


Nothing I Can't Be

by fabfemmeboy



Series: Sincere Baked Goods [10]
Category: Glee
Genre: Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-20
Updated: 2017-12-19
Packaged: 2019-02-17 07:03:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 55,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13071633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fabfemmeboy/pseuds/fabfemmeboy
Summary: Sectionals brings with it a myriad of potential pitfalls, including paranoia, seclusion, exhaustion, and assorted allegations of cheating.





	1. Chapter 1

"No!" The director, all dressed in black, paced the center aisle of the auditorium with a deliberate strut that managed to look not at all frantic. Kurt had to give him credit for his well-shined high-end oxfords; they made a satisfying sound even on the short carpet and added a dramatic flare. "Not even close." Without further fanfare, he walked out the side door of the auditorium.  
  
That was Blaine's cue to step in and actually do something useful. "The merge is where we need work - everyone watch the person in front of you, okay? Instead of trying to look over our shoulders; person behind is the one to correct." A murmur of understand went through the group. Seeing the nods, he continued. "Upper tenors, careful on the intro - if you rush, we start too fast then slow down midway through the song and it sounds sloppy even though we end at the right speed. And Jack, just watch the break before the second chorus." His teammates' eyes were starting to glaze over a little, so he drew in a breath and let it out slowly. "Okay, everybody, ten minutes!"  
  
A collective groan of relief went up from the group of exhausted guys. They'd been dancing for  _hours_  now, reworking choreography they'd been kind of ad-libbing since September. That was the disadvantage to so many impromptu performances, Kurt concluded - when you started playing around with a song for fun and then had to convert it to a competition number after months of doing a pretty good job at just singing something for fun, it meant un-learning a lot of bad habits and basic choreography in favour of something more worthy of Sectionals.   
  
He'd never been part of a group where that was the case. Actually, he'd been on both ends of the spectrum before - in New Directions they would work on numbers for a few weeks but almost always had to change their entire set list right before the competition anyway. The three days they'd had to rework things before Regionals was actually a step up from the mere half hour they'd had to learn the Rolling Stones number before Sectionals the previous year. Choreography was almost entirely ad-lib and playing around for ten minutes to see what didn't suck. Sometimes just being able to get through the vocals and not fall off the risers was considered a victory...especially for Finn, but that was a whole other issue entirely.  
  
Cheerios, on the other hand...the idea of playing around with a number before learning it to perfection was absolutely not in Sue Sylvester's lexicon. From the first practice, she knew exactly what she wanted and the many ways in which her Cheerios were failing to give it to her. He remembered how he used to take home his sheet music and memorize it between the first and second practice on a number because then he only had to get really screamed at once instead of for weeks. She had always appreciated that about him, even if she would never in a million years tell him so.  
  
This was a whole new animal.   
  
He was actually at an advantage, he realized; he was learning it all for the first time in the context of competition. If he had to relearn the Single Ladies dance or something to competition crispness, he could only imagine how much harder it would be for him than for someone who had never done it before.  
  
He walked over to his water bottle and took a long swig. "You seem to be getting it," Blaine commented as he walked over to grab his own bag. "And don't even look like you're going to keel over," he added with a grin as he wiped the sweat from his forehead with his shirt sleeve. For how stupid the Dalton uniforms looked, the gym uniforms weren't half bad: red ringer tshirt with blue trim and crest, blue track pants, optional grey shorts or hoodie.   
  
"We're on...what? Hour three now?" Kurt asked. "I'm used to practices that ran from when school let out at 2:30 until...well, 7 was standard, before competition it was 9-"  
  
"Seriously?" Blaine asked, eyes wide. When Kurt nodded, he turned to Wes. "You hear that?"  
  
"What?"  
  
"His old club is practicing like 7 hours a day this week!"  
  
"We're so screwed."  
  
Kurt barely suppressed a laugh. "No. Oh no. Not New Directions," he assured them. "This was another team I was on."   
  
"Oh," Blaine said with a sheepish grin. "What other team?" he asked at the same time Wes asked, "So how long  _do_ they practice?"  
  
Kurt chose to ignore Wes's question in favour of Blaine's, and not just because he was kind of entranced by Blaine's hair when it was all damp and curly like that. He liked it much better than the slicked down thing Blaine did with it during the day. It would look even better with a little product, he concluded. Some mousse, a little juje... "Hm?"  
  
"What other team?" Blaine asked again. "I can't exactly picture you on football."  
  
He decided to skip right past that one as he could only imagine the jokes that would start - well-meaning, friendly jokes, which was something he was still getting used to, but not exactly the image he needed them to have of him. Especially not once he told them how he led the team to victory. "I was on the Cheerios."  
  
"The what?" David asked.  
  
"Cheerios - five-time national champion cheerleading squad?"  
  
"You were a cheerleader?" Blaine asked with a bemused smile like he was enjoying picturing that.  
  
Kurt shifted uncomfortably. "I sang for the numbers, I wasn't doing flips or anything." Not flips - he tried a back handspring a couple times under Brittany's tutelage before he almost broke his neck and Sue put a stop to it, something about how he couldn't sing if his tongue was being used to control his wheelchair out on the field and how Christopher Reeve wasn't cheery. Mostly just high kicks and one front walkover.  
  
"Really?"   
  
"Yes."  
  
"Oh my god, I saw you," Ethan piped up. The senior had a tendency to end up in the middle of every conversation ever had. He also had the distinction of being "the gayest straight guy ever." "They've got fifteen minutes, right? And almost the entire thing was one big medley of Celine Dion remixes  _in French_. It was completely insane." When the guys stared at him, Ethan added, "What? It's a bunch of girls in short skirts and tight tank tops that don't leave much to the imagination. You thought I  _wouldn't_  be watching? Um, yeah, hi."  
  
Yeah, Kurt couldn't quite get his head around that one. According to all sources, Ethan had resisted all male advances and had a girlfriend in Columbus he made out with pretty publicly, but he set everyone's gaydar pinging. In a weird way, Kurt almost got the feeling it was Ethan's way of fitting in. The idea that a straight guy needed to act gayer, and not vice versa, was one of the many things he was still getting used to at Dalton. The number of guys who went immediately for their bags to re-product between classes was baffling. It wasn't the entire school population by any stretch of the imagination, but it was enough to make Kurt feel like part of a sizable minority instead of being the one and only something.  
  
"You sang on national television in French?" Blaine asked. "I guess that answers the question of whether we need to be worried about you going all stage fright on us this weekend."  
  
Kurt smiled faintly and rolled his eyes. "I'll be fine."  
  
"Good." He draped his arm across Kurt's shoulders and started to lead him back towards the risers, but Kurt ducked out of his grasp.  
  
"I have to make a quick call first."  
  
"Really quick, okay?"  
  
"Yes, Captain," Kurt replied dryly. He grabbed his phone from his bag and ducked out of the auditorium into the hall and speed-dialed.  
  
"Sup?"  
  
"Hey." He couldn't help the faint smile that kind of crept across his lips as he heard Puck's voice. "I know I said I'd be over there around 4, but rehearsal got extended for two more hours. I could still come over around six?"  
  
"No can do," Puck replied. In the background Kurt could hear what sounded like Rachel barking out orders and Santana whining and Mercedes asking why - once again - Rachel automatically got the solo and was going to therefore also be in front the entire damn time.   
  
"Rehearsal of your own?" he asked knowingly.  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"Any idea when you'll be done?" After all, he was without any supervision but Finn until Friday, and he had feeling Finn would be taking advantage of the lack of a curfew himself to go out with Rachel, meaning he could sneak Puck down into the basement without too much trouble...  
  
"Whenever Napoleona decides-"  
  
Puck's voice cut off, then protested from much further away from the phone. "Kurt," Rachel said in a short tone into the receiver, "While all of us are happy for your success at your new school and none of us harbour any ill-will against you even in light of the timing of your departure, I have to insist that you refrain from speaking with any members of New Directions until after Sectionals."  
  
"Even Finn?" he asked dryly.  
  
She didn't respond, and Kurt could practically see her trying to think of a good response to that one. "Fine. As little as possible. And if I find out that you've been attempting to use sexually coercive means to gain insight into our performance-"  
  
"I'd totally do it," he heard Puck announce from beyond Rachel. "Have you seen-" He missed what attribute of his Puck commented on but the resounding "Shut UP!" and "Oh, god, dude, c'mon!" made him think it was exactly as crude as he would expect.  
  
"Rachel, rest assured; I have no interest in stealing any of your secrets."  
  
"You spy-"  
  
"Badly," Kurt replied. "If I were spying, you'd know it."  
  
"Maybe that's what you want us all to think, to- to lull us into a false sense of security-"  
  
The phone transferred hands again. "Hey, dude," Finn said. "Yeah, she's getting paranoid now. See you tonight."   
  
"Hand me back to Pu-" The phone cut off - he assumed because Finn hung it up. Typical. Shaking his head, he carried the phone back to his bag and scurried into place just behind Blaine to begin the number again.  
  
"Everything okay?" Blaine checked.  
  
"Yes. Rachel Berry issues."  
  
"What?"  
  
"Just wait until Saturday - you'll understand."  
  
* * * * *  
Before Burt and Carole left on their honeymoon, they gave the boys exactly two instructions:  
  
1\. No parties.  
2\. No killing each other.  
  
With all-day rehearsals and Kurt's generally uptight, mostly-rule-abiding nature, the first one was almost certain to be followed - or at any rate the "party" would be something along the lines of "Hey, Mom and Burt, all the guys from glee club came over and played Halo for six hours" or "Dad, Mercedes, Tina, and Quinn came to catch up on Project Runway." The second...well, they weren't so sure.  
  
It was a big enough house, they reasoned, for two teenage guys to steer clear of each other if they really wanted to and run into each other only on the way to the kitchen. Anything mundane like fights over the big-screen tv in the living room would have to be sorted out like the new stepbrothers they were. Anything bigger than that...  
  
Well, they had hoped the kids were beyond that now. They were at least speaking to each other in civil terms as of the wedding, so that had to be a good sign, right?  
  
By the time Finn got home around 9, he looked as drained as after a really hard football practice. Kurt, who had had time to shower and recharge already, called an awkward hello from the kitchen.  
  
Well it was strange having someone other than himself or his dad in the house full-time. For that matter, it was strange having someone in the house who came and went as he pleased - up until that point, absent the four days the previous spring, even Finn and Carole tended to come over announced and with a specific occasion in mind, even if that occasion was something simple like game night.   
  
Finn slung off his jacket and Kurt fought the urge to pick it up and hang it neatly.  _His house now, too_  he reminded himself as he drew in a deep breath. "Hey." He flopped onto the couch, which was serving as his bedroom until they could finish the attic, which Burt swore would be the first two weekends after Sectionals.  
  
Why did Finn look more comfortable in his house than he did? Kurt wondered.  
  
"I made chicken if you'd like some," he offered. It was a gesture of goodwill, but the hell if Finn thought Kurt was going to be his personal housewife or something.  
  
Finn looked over at him. "Sure, dude." Kurt put the second chicken breast on a plate and carried it over, then started towards the basement stairs with his own plate. "You could eat up here if you want," Finn suggested in his own peace offering.  
  
Kurt's eyes narrowed suspiciously. Finn didn't tend to volunteer to be alone in a room with him and barely tolerated it if forced by someone like their parents. "Really," he asked dryly.  
  
"Yeah."  
  
Kurt walked slowly around the couch to sit in the chair - not Finn's dad's chair, he knew better than that, the other one. The one that used to sit where Finn's dad's recliner was now but had gotten moved kind of into the corner. They were still working on the feng shui of the living room, and...well, the whole house, actually.   
  
"They call yet?" Finn asked when awkward silence started to hang too heavily in the air.  
  
"Dad called my cell when they didn't get anyone at the house. I wasn't sure when you'd be done but they said they'd try later," Kurt reported. "Apparently your mother likes some antique dresser she found and they're trying to figure out how to have it shipped here without costing more than the entire rest of the honeymoon combined." He didn't reveal the other part of the conversation, where they talked about moving the old broken one downstairs for Kurt to keep safe. While he was glad his father understood the importance of the particular piece of furniture, it still felt strangely dissatisfying. Like his father was moving on - which was a perfectly fine thing to do after more than eight years - but also like every reminder of Kurt's mom was being relegated to the basement. Like he was the only one keeping any of it safe, which he knew was ridiculous, but it was still a feeling he couldn't quite shake.  
  
"Cool, I guess," Finn replied. Kurt felt resentment start to bubble up - why didn't Finn care? Why didn't he-...because his mom had already done this, Kurt remembered. At his own insistence. ...Right. Finn had no need to feel upset at his mother getting a new dresser to replace one she'd only had for six months.  
  
He kind of wished he hadn't pushed Carole into selling everything back then. Now that he knew what it felt like, he got why Finn fought so hard for a stupid hideous chair.  
  
"How'd rehearsal go?" Kurt asked. Glee was a relatively safe subject they'd always had.  
  
Except now, apparently. Finn looked uncomfortable. "I don't know if I'm allowed to tell you." When Kurt gave him a 'really now?' look, Finn added defensively, "Rachel's really freaking out about all of it."  
  
"Rachel's always freaking out the week before Sectionals. It's like clockwork. She'll be hyperventilating into a bag by Wednesday evening then knock it out of the park on Saturday. She's horrible under the build-up but fantastic under pressure," Kurt recited dryly.  
  
"She's like, facebook-stalking all of us and if anyone posts lyrics or anything about our location or how long we're rehearsing she said she'd replace us with Jacob ben Israel and he can't hit any of the notes, dude. She tried to block everyone from Twitter."  
  
"Apparently my supposed defection has made things even worse than usual."  
  
"Yeah. She threatened Puck the most, but she doesn't really trust me either right now."  
  
"Finn. Do you really think I'm going to tell them what's going on? And if I wanted to, wouldn't I have done it already?"  
  
Finn thought a minute, then allowed, "Okay, dude," and began to tell him about Santana and Mercedes' unlikely alliance to stage an attempted coup if Rachel didn't let them at least have water breaks once an hour. Good to know some things never changed.  
  
* * * * *  
  
The downside to his kid living in a big fancy mansion with perfect lawns and expensive cars and shit, he concluded, was that people looked at him really weird when he showed up in his crappy truck.  
  
Maybe he should tell people he was the landscaper. Or tell them about his pool-cleaning business. Anyone with a house that big had to have a pool, right? This could be a totally new market, and judging how much the MILFs he'd seen already looked like they spent on their ugly-ass jogging suits, he could make a killing. They'd so pay him double what he usually charged.  
  
He knew Shelby probably didn't need him to pay for anything, otherwise he would offer.   
  
Well, Beth still didn't have a dad around. He should at least hold up his end of the bargain until one showed up, right? Or...something like that.   
  
Honestly, he wasn't sure why he'd blown off his afternoon classes to drive over here. Not like he needed a reason to skip geometry and English - what? He spoke it fine, what else did a person need to study about it? But driving more than half an hour each way in time to show up at glee rehearsal at 3 was kind of a stretch. And he still wasn't sure if he should be there.  
  
Shelby had said to come over but call first, and he would've - he tried, but he wasn't sure what the hell to say when she answered so he just kind of hung up and drove over. He wasn't even sure how to introduce himself before he could ask. What was he supposed to say? "Hi, it's the dude whose daughter you're raising, sup?" They weren't really on a first-name basis yet, but they were still kind of close in a way he couldn't really get his head around.  
  
Kurt would know. Kurt would have an entire freaking etiquette book on this shit because he always did. But he'd have to tell the guy first, and he didn't know how to answer the first question he'd get, which was "Why?"   
  
So he just kind of drove over there, but there was another car in the driveway - a lot like the Vocal Adrenaline SUV Shelby had, but way nicer. The thing had rims. And tvs mounted in the backs of the backseat so if you drove behind him you could freaking watch MTV Cribs, which this guy's house was probably on.   
  
That settled it. He was definitely gonna start passing out business cards around here. People with that kind of money could pay him enough to get an upgrade car. And rims- okay, not as sweet as those, but pretty cool. Maybe something with spikes.   
  
He glanced at his phone - he only had half an hour before he had to leave again. He guessed he should stop stalling. Otherwise it just meant he'd driven across Western Ohio, contemplated a new business plan, developed car envy, and driven back. Sighing, he got out of the car and slammed the door, then walked up the driveway and knocked on the front door.  
  
Shelby answered. "...Hi," she said awkwardly.  
  
"Hi."  
  
"You didn't call or anything-"  
  
"Yeah, I'm sorry, I just kinda..." Puck shrugged.  
  
"Shouldn't you be in school?" When Puck just shrugged again, she stepped back. "Come on," she allowed. "She's over there," she nodded towards the playpen where an assortment of baby gadgets with spinners and wheels and gears and random noisemaking buttons surrounded the six-month-old.   
  
"Thanks." He sat on the floor awkwardly outside the playpen as he watched her play with a spider with long floppy legs made out of calico fabric.   
  
Shelby took a seat on the couch and resumed her conversation. "Sorry. Where were we?" she asked.  
  
"Amy." When the guy spoke, Puck glanced over to get a look at the dude who belonged to the sweet ride in the driveway. He looked like a total douchebag. For one thing, he wore one of those stupid earbuds for his phone even though he was talking to an actual person - where did he think he was? New York or something? They were in fucking-...okay, not Lima, but Carmel wasn't much better. Total poser, trying to look all important. And the all-black thing? Even though he knew - thanks to Kurt - that the jacket probably cost more than the Puckmobile, and even though head-to-toe black could look seriously badass, this guy just looked like he was trying to look all urban and too important for his minions or something.   
  
Dude was definitely overcompensating for something. He smirked at the thought as he lifted Beth out of her playpen and sat her in his lap as he watched her try to gnaw on the cloth toy.  
  
"She has the notes, believe me. She just crumbles under pressure. You don't want her taking the solo," Shelby stated.  
  
"She'll get it. I'll keep her late." He pulled out his Ozone to make a note, then appeared to be checking emails while he kept talking. "The guys, too."  
  
"They got used to not stepping up as much the last few years - they had Jesse to carry them."  
  
"Right," El douchebag-o replied dryly, distractedly. "Shane's not bad."  
  
"Pretty good, actually. And if you team him with Jack-"  
  
"Mmhmm." He quirked a blondish eyebrow and put away his phone. "Gotta go. Thanks."   
  
"Right," Shelby said slowly, eyeing him like she wanted to ask 'why did you come to talk to me if you won't listen to anything I say?' She stood and led him to the door, then let out a frustrated "Ugh" as she closed it behind him.  
  
Puck didn't say a word, just raised an eyebrow in Shelby's general direction, and she answered. Sweet - he still had it going for him. "He's my successor. Plenty intense but he doesn't bother to know them. I pushed those kids but at the end of the day I  _knew_  who was capable of what, who would crack and who wouldn't. I made them flawless, he treats them like robots."   
  
"They're robots anyway," Puck snorted.  
  
"You're just bitter."  
  
"Maybe. I get that way when people fuck with my team."  
  
"You're still talking about the toilet paper?" she asked with a kind of dry indignance, like she couldn't believe she was stuck listening to a juvenile delinquent whine about the wrongs that had befallen him.  
  
"I'm talking about Jesse."  
  
Shelby's face fell. "I never meant for that one to happen. That was peer pressure, I wouldn't-...she's still my daughter, even if we can't make things work as simply as we thought."  
  
He didn't know what the right response was to that, so he went with simple and honest. "Gotta head out," he said. It took a little more effort than he expected to put Beth back into her playpen - not physically, she wasn't that big yet and hadn't reached the clawing like a wild beast stage, but he kind of wanted to stay longer. "Sectionals this weekend, rehearsals all night."  
  
"Pretty long way to come for a short visit," she observed.  
  
"I guess," he replied simply. He shrugged on his jacket and headed for the door.   
  
"Break a leg this weekend," Shelby said, one hand on her hip as she watched him. She didn't seem to have any better idea how to deal with him than he knew how to deal with her; it was reassuring, at least a little. Not like she had the upper hand or anything.   
  
"Thanks." He opened the front door, but her voice stopped him.  
  
"Tell Rachel I said so, too?" she requested. Her arms were crossed now awkwardly, and he could kind of picture Quinn looking the same way in a couple decades - except a lot less Jewish. Standing there all MILFy with her new kid she was actually ready for, but wanting Beth to do well or something.  
  
"Sure," he replied noncommitally.  
  
He'd tell her, he just didn't have to be all sappy about it. Rachel'd still end up grilling him for like twenty minutes about what Shelby's exact words were and how she sounded when she said it, and what her inflection or whatever had been. He better start practicing his annoyed eyebrow raises now.


	2. Chapter 2

Kurt leaned back in the comfortable lounge chair, legs crossed, as he tried to avoid checking his phone for the seventeenth time in the past four minutes. He wasn't sure if the senior lounge was really open for anyone who wanted to be there, or just for any  _Warblers_  who wanted to be there, but in any event no one ever tried to stop him from commandeering the spot in the corner near the fireplace. He reached into his bag and dug out his french book to try to concentrate on something other than how little time was passing.  
  
It had been difficult, but he and Puck had been able to carve out exactly ninety minutes to spend together. Thanks to a ridiculously early-morning Warblers practice and an evening rehearsal for New Directions in anticipation of a defense-and-special-teams football practice Puck was exempt from, but Kurt didn't care - he hadn't seen the guy since the wedding. He'd barely even  _spoken_  to Puck since the wedding on Saturday, and now that Rachel was freaking out even more than usual...  
  
"Qu'est-ce que tu fais?" came a voice from behind him, and he jumped. Blaine laughed softly as he walked around the chair. "Either you're deeply involved in studying or you haven't even looked at the page."  
  
"Sorry," Kurt replied as he smoothed the page self-conscious - Blaine was right, he didn't even know what chapter he'd opened to.   
  
"Don't know what to do with yourself without being forced to sing the same song over and over?" he teased.  
  
"God, don't remind me," David grumbled as he wandered over. "Blaine, we've gotta talk about the song selection. And about next time not picking a song we've done all year already - we sing it more than enough these three weeks."  
  
"We need to get it perfect," Charlie replied from his place perched on the radiator.  
  
"We  _need_  to be ourselves, and the more we practice the more we sound like we're bored," David said.  
  
Kurt pulled his phone from his jacket pocket and checked it again. Nothing, and another three minutes had passed. This was starting to eat into their hour and a half together, and wow was that sad. "Everything okay?" Blaine asked, and though Kurt hadn't been paying attention he got the feeling Blaine had interrupted himself to ask it.   
  
"Yes."  
  
"You're kinda checking that thing every thirty seconds."  
  
"I most certainly am not. It's been three minutes," he replied with a defensive edge.  
  
"So what's up?"  
  
"My boyfriend's coming to pick me up."  
  
"Boyfriend?" Charlie asked, his ears perking up. "Oh, do tell," he grinned and scooched closer.   
  
"Tell what?" Kurt asked, closing his book.  
  
"What's his name?" Wes had appeared seemingly out of nowhere, and when Kurt looked up he saw easily a half-dozen fellow Warblers surrounding the chair. He wasn't sure if they were so desperate for gossip or non-serious, non-song-related conversation that they all gravitated towards him, or if they had a bet going about his personal life and needed to determine the winner, or if they had been there for longer and he just hadn't noticed them because he kept checking his phone instead.   
  
"Puck," Blaine supplied. The look on Blaine's face was unreadable, which Kurt thought was strange. Normally he was open, enthusiastically unguarded, with the ability to become almost as rubbery as any slapstick comedian when he wanted it to. The kind of "hm" look was almost like a step backwards or something; Kurt wondered if this was what Blaine had looked like at his old school. Surely he must have had a mask there - Kurt was beginning to realize that everyone in public school did, especially people who were just a little too fabulous, who were taunted, tortured...but even assuming that this was Blaine's old mask, Kurt wasn't entirely sure why it seemed to be making an appearance on his friend's face.  
  
"Puck?" Wes repeated, laughing.  
  
"Noah Puckerman, but no one calls him that," Kurt replied. He had used 'Noah' exactly once with disastrous results and had no intentions of doing so again.   
  
"Is he hot?" Charlie asked.  
  
"Very," Kurt replied.  
  
"Since he's Puck...Is he mischievous?" Charlie imitated a villain tapping his fingers together in succession.   
  
"More badass than mischievous."  
  
"Badass?" Ethan asked.  
  
"I cannot picture you with a badass," Blaine stated firmly. "You're so..."  
  
"Gay?" Kurt replied dryly.  
  
"No. I mean, yes, but mostly you're just so...straight-laced, no pun intended."  
  
"Yeah, you're like this put-together uber-star student from planet perfect or something," Ethan added. "You so can't handle a badass."  
  
"I handle him just fine," Kurt grinned and Charlie let out an "ooooooo!"  
  
He blushed. He couldn't help it - having that many people interested in his love life was incredibly awkward and made him feel a little like a circus sideshow, but at the same time something about it felt so delightfully  _normal_. In his entire life, talking about boys had felt normal only in the presence of girls, and even then usually only with Mercedes or Quinn. Everyone else just looked uncomfortable - even his father, who was incredibly supportive (though that was changing, as evidenced by the proud look he'd gotten at the wedding), even Finn now that they were okay... Before Dalton, the only straight high school guy who hadn't responded with extreme discomfort to hearing Kurt even mention guys, let alone talk about them like this, was Sam. This...  
  
This felt like other people.  
  
From the age of five, when he first realized just how different he was, he had wondered what it must feel like to be other kids. What it would be like to not care if clothes matched or fit properly. What they thought of when they looked at the people and saw others who were like them. What it felt like to be a  _part_  of instead of isolated from everyone.  
  
For a long time he convinced himself it wasn't all it was cracked up to be, what they felt. After all, even people he knew fit in perfectly well with the people around them still seemed miserable. He wasn't missing much,he told himself, and he was gaining much more by being himself freely and without shame.   
  
Never in his life had he thought he could have both. Not until this place, and these people, and Blaine...   
  
The phone beeped a familiar 8-note pattern and Kurt picked it up. The message from Puck read  _wtf r u?_. Kurt knew it wasn't an existential question; Puck abbreviated any question word - except 'how', of course - as 'w' for purposes of asking 'the fuck?'" "And there he is," Kurt reported. He stood and picked up his bag.  
  
"He's here?" Charlie asked, eyes lighting up. "We've gotta meet this boy."  
  
"At least check him out," Wes confirmed.  
  
"Make sure he's worthy," Blaine added.  
  
"Guys-"  
  
"To the parking lot!" Ethan commanded.  
  
He should have been annoyed, but he felt a little kingly as he led the band of curious Warblers down the hall towards the main parking lot - they all wanted to check out the guy he was dating? Really?   
  
Puck was waiting in the nearly-empty parking lot, leaning against his crappy truck, looking bored. Kurt walked over to him but could practically feel the guys' jaws dropping as they took in the black boots, jeans, hoodie, letterman jacket, the mohawk, the whole quintessentially Puck package - complete with a 'seriously, dude?' eyebrow raise as he noticed the gaggle of uniformed boys behind Kurt.   
  
"What's with-"  
  
"Don't ask," Kurt replied. "C'mon - I'm parked over here," he said.  
  
Puck glanced at the group of Kurt's slack-jawed new friends - or at least, guys who didn't seem to be trying to kick Kurt's ass - and decided their usual post-school greeting was fully appropriate. He caught Kurt's jacket-clad wrist and pulled him into a hot kiss, the kind that usually was accompanied by practically bending Kurt backwards over the hood of one of their vehicles.   
  
What? The guy kept saying what a gay-friendly school this place was, how two of the dudes held hands almost as much as Brittany and Santana, and he didn't get to make out with Kurt in the McKinley parking lot after glee club anymore. And he hadn't seen him in seriously like four days, and that was at the wedding where his freaking dad was - and his new stepmom, and like half the town - so he couldn't really stick his tongue down Kurt's throat or anything.   
  
He half-wondered if Kurt would be pissed at him when the kiss ended; not like he should be, but the guy got weird about PDAs sometimes for no fucking reason  _he_  could tell. Sometimes he was all about doing whatever felt good, other times he was practically shoving them behind a DJ booth to dance, and trying to figure out what was cool or not just kind of made his brain want to bleed. But Kurt just blushed and ducked his head to avoid making eye contact with any of his friends before leading Puck towards the other end of the parking lot, where his Navigator sat; he was grinning.  
  
"Well," Wes said as the pair walked off.  
  
"Yeah," David added, head tilted slightly.  
  
"That was..."  
  
"Hot," Charlie replied, eyes wide.  
  
"Well, he wasn't kidding about the guy," Blaine said finally.   
  
"Totally unfair," Ethan added, and they all stared at him. "Guys who have the badass thing going for them always get the girls - and guys."  
  
"Dude, you get every girl you see. You walk up to them and sound like  _that_  and talk about clothes and crap, and they fall in love with you. Then you tell them you're not actually gay and they throw themselves at you," David pointed out.  
  
"At my product closet, not at my bed," Ethan lamented sadly.  
  
As they approached the car, Puck asked, "Where are we going anyway?"  
  
"Well, I figured since we don't have that much time, and either of us driving to or from Lima would eat up a full hour, and need to get back here," Kurt began, and Puck smirked. Kurt's car had serious advantages over the Puckmobile, namely that the back seat folded all the way down to create a decent-sized flat surface, the heat worked better even when the thing was parked, and the thing had tinted windows.   
  
...Speaking of nice cars.  
  
As Kurt unlocked the car and Puck surveyed the mostly-empty parking lot to check out the interruption factors. Another big black SUV was parked a few rows away, taking up literally four spaces - whoever owned the thing was either an ass or paranoid. Or a paranoid ass. Then he saw the tv's mounted into the backseats.  
  
Two people in Ohio had cars like that? Had Xzibit been making the rounds? Because he totally deserved an upgrade if Pimp My Ride was in town-  
  
"Whose is that?" Puck asked, nodding that direction.  
  
Kurt looked. "No idea. Anyway. I'll probably get home later than you will, even with Rachel on the warpath - there's a meeting about the spring musical, and since - unlike at McKinley - there's an actual drama club instead of the spontaneous creation and dissolution at the disturbing whims of Mr. Ryerson, I'm certainly not about to pass that up."  
  
"What musical?" Puck asked, fully expecting not to know it anyway.  
  
"Grease."  
  
"How do you do that without, y'know, chicks?"  
  
"It's an all-male production. Assuming we're allowed to do it. A gay mens chorus in Washington almost got shut down when they made the show explicitly gay and had to change all the pronouns and everything back the week before the show's opening. Blaine says I'd be great as Sandy, and I do make a fantastic blonde. He's practically a lock for Danny." When Puck didn't respond, Kurt rolled his eyes. "You could just tell me to shut up and get in the back of the car, you know," he said with obviously-feigned annoyance.  
  
"What's he doing here?" Puck asked as a figure clad all in black strode out of the school towards the assholishly-parked SUV. He was talking to himself, or to the stupid bluetooth thing, and was most definitely the same guy he'd seen at Shelby's.  
  
Kurt followed Puck's gaze. "Our nominal coach. Blaine does all the work, Coach Goolsby gets the credit and the money."  
  
"He coaches you guys? The Warblers?"  
  
"Yes," Kurt replied irritatedly. If Puck wasn't going to listen to his answer, why did he ask?  
  
"He's Vocal Adrenaline's coach."  
  
"What do you mean? How do you know?"  
  
"He was at Shel- Ms. Corcoran's, they were talking about who to give solos to and stuff. She said he's her successor but sucks because he doesn't actually know the kids or anything, not like she did."  
  
"When were you over there?" Kurt asked.  
  
Puck stared at him. "That's all you can come up with?" he asked in a tone that clearly told Kurt to back the fuck off. He hadn't used that tone in awhile, not since the whole Meatloaf song, and Kurt's eyes widened. "I'm serious, man, he's coaching the enemy."  
  
"They're not competing in our section," Kurt said slowly as he tried to work through the implications in his head. Vocal Adrenaline wasn't competing against either of them until Regionals, if they ever did - everyone was waiting to see what would happen with Ms. Corcoran out of the coaching chair. After all, no way the Cheerios could win another National title without Coach Sylvester - if she did something crazy like get that promotion to Governor or somehow end up in jail or get stampeded by a heard of wild jackalopes. With a new coach that Kurt knew firsthand was distant and uninvolved, there was a better-than-even chance that Vocal Adrenaline wouldn't even  _make_  it to Regionals.  
  
"It's still not cool. There's something going on there."  
  
He didn't disagree. He didn't know what that something was yet, he couldn't put his finger on why it felt so underhanded, but he couldn't deny it made him feel uneasy. There wasn't anything out-and-out  _wrong_  about it, and while he didn't have the entire Ohio HighSchool Show Choir Handbook memorized, he definitely didn't recall anything on there stating that each coach could only coach one team. There were rules stating a  _student_  could only be a member of one team at a time, but the rules were silent on the topic of coaches. For that matter, it didn't even touch on consultants - and after all, hadn't they tried to hire Dakota Stanley even though he was also choreographing for Vocal Adrenaline at the time and they knew they would eventually face their future nemesis likely with choreography created by the same man? That wasn't against any rules, nor was it even considered wrong - according to Rachel, it was standard practice and they weren't the only two teams who hired the illustrious Stanley to torture the living hell out of them.  
  
Why was this any different?  
  
"Even assuming there is," Kurt said, sounding edgy, "what precisely do you propose I do? It's three days before Regionals."  
  
"Managed to get Mr. Schue replaced the week before. See if someone can-"  
  
"Ms. Pillsbury took over because Figgins and Ms. Sylvester told him he had violated the rules. Even if Coach Goolsby wasn't self-involved and unresponsive to what the group needs or wants, the administration would have to back me up."  
  
"You always talk about how cool they are, if you said something-"  
  
"No way," Kurt replied, eyes wide.  
  
"Why?"  
  
"I've been here less than a month. No one outside the Warblers really knows me yet. Besides, assuming I go tell them and they don't do anything, then what? I walk off the team in protest? The scholarship is the only reason I'm here, and it's absolutely  _required_  that I-"  
  
"Calm down," Puck said firmly. "Don't say anything. Whatever. You gotta do what you gotta do."  
  
Kurt sighed and slumped against the cold metal of the door. "I'm not trying to fight with you," he said finally. "But honestly, what good would it do? Yes, he's an idiot and has an air of self-importance that makes me look modest, and I can guarantee if he's found a way to do something underhanded, he's doing it. But at least he gets out of the way enough to let Blaine run things the way they should be run. He may not recognize what makes us good, but Blaine does and that's more than I can say about anything Mr. Schue ever did." He shook his head. "It may all be moot in three days, anyway. If either we or Vocal Adrenaline lose, then who cares if he's been coaching both?"  
  
"And if both of you win?"  
  
"Then I'll say something," Kurt replied firmly. That  _would_  be a lot easier to figure out precisely why it was wrong, and there would be a lot more concrete evidence of underhanded activity. This was all tenuated and had an air of paranoia about it that sounded more appropriate coming from Rachel than from Puck.  
  
"Okay," Puck replied simply. He didn't know exactly what would happen then, either. He knew after the 23-year-old lineman on steroids - literally - had fucked up Sam's shoulder, the school had to forfeit every win the kid had played in. But that was something different, that was something that was clearly prohibited by like every rulebook ever. This was a lot iffier.  
  
Kurt looked at his phone and sighed. "A little less than an hour."  
  
"Damn. Really?"  
  
"Yeah. But there is a little secluded spot a few miles from here, if you want to-"  
  
"I do," Puck replied with a smirk that made Kurt grin. He unlocked the car and hopped in.  
  
* * * * *  
  
When the meeting about the musical was shorter than he expected, Kurt believed he would easily beat Finn home from the late rehearsal. The house was dark as he pulled into the driveway. He parked in his usual place and walked to the door-  
  
Which was unlocked.  
  
He grabbed the first thing he could find - a medium-sized umbrella with a curved handle - and stepped inside. "Hello?" he called, wielding the umbrella nervously. Why did this have to happen when his dad wasn't even remotely nearby? What good would he do against some kind of intruder? What if they took the valuables? All the stuff Finn and Carole had just moved in - they would never forgive him if he let someone else steal-...oh god, his  _clothes_ -  
  
"In here, dude," Finn called quietly from the living room.  
  
Kurt dropped the umbrella to a more normal umbrella-carrying position as he entered the living room. He thought from the fact that the tv wasn't on that maybe Finn had been trying to sleep, but it wasn't even 9:30 yet and Finn almost always slept with the tv on. He flicked on the light and Finn flinched.  
  
The guy looked  _terrible_.  
  
"What happened?" Kurt asked. For how blank Finn's face always looked, he somehow managed to seem like he was halfway between being pissed and crying, and that wasn't something Kurt ever thought he'd even consider coming from Finn. He looked tense and defeated and...confused above everything else. Like he couldn't figure out how it had come to this. Finn couldn't answer him at first, and that worried him because that meant it must be  _bad_.   
  
What if it was their parents? Some kind of freak volcano-climbing accident or a helicopter crash or they really did end up like the characters on Lost somewhere-  
  
"She broke up with me," Finn said finally, staring at the edge of the coffee table.  
  
That was it? Seriously? Kurt was envisioning doomsday scenarios and it was over Rachel?  
  
But wait. That didn't make any sense. She'd been practically threatening it whenever she would find out about something idiotically homophobic Finn had done or said, but she'd never really followed through on it. Not entirely her fault, and it wasn't her battle to fight in the first place so Kurt had used it only for leverage and took no offense at her inaction. But Finn was doing okay now. He was adjusting, they were starting to bond a little, he hadn't gotten the "Dude, don't molest me in the shower today, okay?" look since a week or so before the wedding.   
  
He wondered if maybe Rachel didn't know Finn was improving on that front. No...she had to, right? Because she'd been the one to comment on it at the wedding, pointing out that Finn didn't even look like he wanted to actively discourage Kurt and Puck from dancing.   
  
Had Finn said something else?   
  
"What happened?" Kurt asked cautiously. A few nights ago he might have done something like move over to the couch to be a supportive ear, but he wasn't sure how that would be received in light of...all this, so he simply stood over towards the chair, arms crossed over his chest.  
  
"Santana had to go run her stupid mouth," he muttered.  
  
Oh. So it was a  _girl_  problem instead of a...boy problem. Okay.  
  
"What'd she say?"  
  
"She posted 'He's not that Finnocent' on her facebook." Kurt barely restrained himself from laughing at the Britney lyric, the nickname, the whole thing - Finn was hurting, that much was more than obvious, but the post was about the most Brittana-collaborative thing he'd ever heard. "So Rachel's been stalking everyone, right, to make sure no one's posting anything about our set list or rehearsal schedule or vitamin regimens-" Kurt raised an eyebrow but Finn didn't notice or address the question. "and she saw it. Which is what Santana wanted because she's never happy unless someone else is miserable."   
  
When Finn stared at his hand for a long time, Kurt prompted, "So Rachel freaked?"  
  
"Yeah," Finn replied with a grim choked-out laugh. "She asked if I cheated on her- and I said no, dude, because I didn't. And I wouldn't - never. You know that. I couldn't do that to her - and I  _love_  Rachel. There's no way. A-and I told her that. But she didn't believe me and she asked point-blank if I slept with Santana and-"  
  
"...And you told her that you did a year ago," Kurt concluded quietly.  
  
"I thought I had to be honest with her. I mean...I know what it feels like to be lied to about someone you love sleeping with someone else, y'know? And even though I didn't get Santana pregnant or anything - at least, I don't think so," he added, and Kurt wondered just how long Finn thought the human gestation period  _was_  that Santana could have been impregnated in February and still showing no sign, let alone an infant, "and I kind of lied to her a year ago when I said I didn't sleep with Santana and she said she did sleep with Jesse, and then I kind of lied to her again when she told me she  _didn't_  sleep with Jesse but I didn't say anything? She asked me, and I couldn't lie and say no, dude, I didn't."  
  
Kurt wasn't sure how bad of a sign it was that he was starting to be able to follow Finn's rambling without even really trying.   
  
"Then she got really pissed and told me she didn't want to speak to me ever again, and she would deal with me only when it had to do with glee club, and she gave away our solos."  
  
Kurt stared. "She gave away-"  
  
"Yeah. We were gonna sing-...okay, I shouldn't tell you I guess, because she's already mad enough at me and if she finds out I broke all the rules for it she'll be even more pissed, but we were gonna do like last year at Sectionals, the two of us for the opening number, then one with just her, then a group one."  
  
"She gave up her solo?" Kurt asked. Rachel was starting to be a better person - or at least a less annoying one. He could recognize that. But giving up solos in a competition, on the big stage? That was well beyond anything he'd thought she was capable of.  
  
"Just the duet. She said something about needing the solo to express her anger and heartbreak over my fidelity."  
  
"Infidelity," Kurt corrected, and Finn just slumped further into the couch.  
  
"I should've just told her," Finn sighed. "I mean, when it happened - it's not like she hadn't told me she slept with Jesse, I should've just told her and then only she would've lied and Santana wouldn't be able to screw with us like this."  
  
"Maybe," Kurt allowed. "Too late to change that now, though."  
  
"Yeah. It was stupid.  _I_  was stupid."  
  
"Not stupid. Naive and oddly reversing a classic heterocentric double standard, but..you weren't stupid, Finn." He sat down on the couch beside Finn - though not too close, just in case his stepbrother harboured any continuing nightmares that he would make a move in his time of despair. Nevermind that he'd kept plenty of distance after the breakup with Quinn which was in the height of his obsessive crush. Finn didn't look like he objected but was looking more depressed by the minute. "You were broken up - she broke up with you. You didn't do anything wrong...well, except the fact that it was Santana, but I might be biased there," he added with a faint smile, which Finn returned.  
  
"She's still sleeping with Puck?"  
  
"No. But he called her bluff, so she needed a new target; apparently Rachel's it," Kurt allowed.  
  
"Thanks," Finn said irritatedly, but it was obvious he wasn't actually annoyed with Kurt.  
  
"Is she trying to get you back or something?"  
  
"I don't know. She said something at the wedding about how if she told everyone what happened it would make sure I stayed popular - more popular than Sam - but I told her no because I didn't want to hurt Rachel. But she hasn't, like, tried to move in on me again or anything." Kurt nodded. "Rachel makes me crazy sometimes, but I  _really_  don't like when she's pissed at me, and not just because she gets all mean and..."  
  
"Vindictive," Kurt supplied, and Finn looked like he wasn't sure what that meant but it sounded right.   
  
A year ago he wouldn't have cared. Okay, not true - a year ago he would have jumped for joy at Finn being on the market and potentially open to conversion. Six months ago, once he was off that bandwagon, he wouldn't have cared except insofar as he had to suffer through an already-insufferable Rachel in the midst of heartbreak going all rehearsal-Nazi on everyone. But now...he remembered what it felt like to have Puck not speaking to him, not returning his texts, how absolutely out of his mind it made him, how he felt cold and quivery all the time even when he could stop himself from thinking about how lonely he was for a few minutes.   
  
If Finn had done something really stupid or obnoxious or committed an actual betrayal, that would be one thing. But here...this was all Santana's fault.  
  
"Let me talk to her," Kurt suggested, and Finn looked at him like he was crazy. "We're not enemies like we used to be, we've kind of...and I can't believe I have to actually admit this...bonded a little in the past few months. Since the duet. I'll try to reason with her."  
  
"With Rachel?"  
  
"I know - reasoning with her is a difficult proposition under the best of circumstances, let alone when she's upset. But I'll try."  
  
Finn looked over at him and met his eyes for the first time. "Thanks, dude," he said quietly but with a deep, obvious sincerity.   
  
"Don't thank me until we know if it works," Kurt brushed it off, but he did appreciate it.  
  
But couldn't they have one freaking competition week without this much drama?


	3. Chapter 3

  
Even though he knew he'd moved on to bigger and better things, walking into the McKinley High School auditorium still filled Kurt with a nearly-overwhelming feeling of nostalgia. He couldn't even count the number of afternoons he'd spent in there, the number of songs he'd sung...He could practically hear "Don't Stop Believing" start playing as he walked in.   
  
It felt almost like another life, like he'd been another person. He remembered the overwhelming feeling of relief he would get as he walked through the double doors at the back of the auditorium - it was one of the few places in the school he felt safe, like people had his back and the ones who wanted to hurt him wouldn't even venture in unless forced. He remembered the practically explosive feeling of expression on the stage, as he tried to somehow expel everything that had been building and bubbling inside him throughout the day. He remembered feeling like that room, that stage, was the only place in the school he could ever be at home.   
  
He didn't get that feeling at Dalton. Probably because the entire world could be his home there. He still came alive onstage, rehearsal was still his favourite part of the day, but it wasn't nearly as desperate of a need. He could sing because he loved it and he couldn't help himself, not because he felt like he would die without it from sheer implosion factor.   
  
That Rachel was alone onstage was simultaneously surprising and expected. He knew she was obsessive even in the best of circumstances, bordering on fanatical, and he assumed she using music as a coping mechanism much as he always had. But at the same time, he was kind of surprised that the rest of the club wasn't there; she'd been dragging them in for extra rehearsals all week.  
  
"I'm announcing myself so you don't think I'm committing espionage," he announced as he walked down the left side aisle from the back of the hall.  
  
"What do you want?" she asked. She looked him up and down in his uniform as she shuffled music on top of the piano - he assumed to try to conceal which songs were for competition and which were for pleasure.   
  
"To talk to you."  
  
"I have nothing to say to you, Kurt," she replied. Her tone was clipped and her hair flipped from side to side as she shook her head. She kept her eyes on the music to avoid having to make eye contact even as he ascended the three stairs onto the stage. "You're the competition as far as I'm concerned. Like I told Puck-"  
  
"I didn't come to talk about Puck. I came to talk about Finn."  
  
Her eyes widened in surprise, then narrowed in a more hardened glare. "I don't want to talk about him." Kurt raised an eyebrow - she never actually didn't want to talk about something. She was almost physically incapable of talking about things. "Did you know?" she asked, finally meeting his eyes.  
  
"Yes."  
  
"Did everyone?" she added nervously. "Everyone but me?"  
  
Kurt thought a moment. "No. I knew, Santana and I assume Brittany. I don't actually know if Puck knew."  
  
"You didn't tell anyone?"  
  
"You seriously overestimate how much space in my life I devote to your and Finn's love life," he replied coolly. Rachel shuffled her music again and Kurt added, "He didn't mean to hurt you."  
  
She looked up. "You're defending him?" she asked, hurt. "After everything he's said to you -  _about_  you?"  
  
"You were broken up. You dumped him to date Benedict Arnold. He was under no obligation to be faithful to you when you weren't actually together."  
  
"He lied to me."  
  
"You lied to him, too," Kurt pointed out.  
  
"I told him I did something that I didn't do. He told me he didn't do something he did, which is worse."  
  
"Would you rather he lied to you when you asked him yesterday?"  
  
Her eyes narrowed and she replied, "You shouldn't be here. You're our competition now." He supposed he shouldn't have been surprised that she sidestepped the question, but how blatant it was did give him pause. Usually she bothered to at least pretend to connect two unrelated topics, even if they only made sense in her kind of strange little mind.  
  
"Nice use of misdirection," Kurt said dryly with a judgmental raise of his eyebrow.   
  
"None of this would've happened if you'd stayed here, you know. She's doing this because she needs someone to torture and I'm the only one left-"  
  
"So I should have stayed at a school where I was a punching bag so that Santana could torture me instead?"  
  
She looked uncomfortable, like she wouldn't have put it like  _that_  and when he recast it in that light she realized how flimsy and kind of mean it was. "She's trying to fight me for the solo. A solo I was going to give to you - or, at least, let you try for."  
  
"How magnanimous," Kurt replied. Not in a million years would she have given up whatever solo it was. Agreeing to let Mercedes do "And I'm Telling You" had been almost more than Rachel could take. He would have chalked it up to her whole campaign to be a better person now, to let him have a solo because he was sad because his life sucked so much at McKinley, but when she put it like that he highly doubted there was any scenario in which he would have actually gotten the number. Absent Mr. Schue forcing them to compete fair and square with the assurance that people would vote for who they thought sang the song better...  
  
"Fair and square. Diva-off style." He wondered if she would have considered the Diva-off so fair and square if he'd rightfully won. Cheesus knows she didn't think it was so fair that he was even allowed to try out for it. When he said nothing, just kind of raised his eyebrows in a 'really now?' expression, she added, "Well, don't you even want to know what song Mr. Schue suggested as a solo for you?"  
  
The idea that Mr. Schue had been the one to suggest it was almost more surprising than the idea of  _Rachel_  suggesting a solo for anyone other than herself. Mr. Schue could be fair when forced, but mostly he had his favourites and stuck up for them while kind of ignoring the needs of anyone else. Not intentionally, Kurt had concluded finally after more than a year of wondering why precisely he could never get ahead of the curve; there was no malice, and odds were good that Mr. Schue didn't even realize he stuck up for Rachel and Finn and Tina and Artie in ways he didn't for Kurt or Mercedes. But the fact remained, if the choice existed between giving a solo to Kurt and giving a solo to almost any other person in the room, Kurt had gotten thrown scraps - a line here or there that almost always got cut from the final performance in the interest of time. His only solos were either self-made or part of a competition his dad forced him to be allowed into.   
  
He wondered when the suggestion had come and why he hadn't known about it. Chances were it was after he was already out the door and regret was setting in. He would have felt guilty, but after everything...he kind of relished it. He knew he shouldn't, but considering very few people had stood up for him and then they'd gotten pissed at him for getting himself into a better situation...He would have stood up for any of them - he  _had_  stood up for Tina when Karofsky shoved her, for Rachel during the egging - but most of his friends hadn't realized he was being tortured until Quinn and Sam forced an intervention. Mr. Schue probably still didn't know 99% of it. And judging by the fact that this was the first he was hearing of the solo, he guessed it wasn't something that had been seriously contemplated while he was in a position to take it.  
  
That almost bothered him more.  
  
"Which song?" he asked finally, his curiosity getting the better of him.  
  
"Don't Cry for Me-"  
  
"-Argentina," Kurt concluded.  
  
It was oddly appropriate for the circumstances, the more he thought about it, even if he'd never understood quite what the song was meant to be saying in the show itself. After all, it's being sung by the powerful President's wife on the balcony before a throng of cheering supporters, talking about how she never left them - no one was trying to say she'd left them. They were  _trying_  to say she was a power-hungry woman who slept her way to the top and was taking too much influence. It was a beautiful song but had hardly made sense for those circumstances.  
  
For his own, on the other hand...  
  
The reprise seemed more apt still, and he began to sing it quietly a capella - he was more used to that than to accompaniment these days.  
  
 _I want to tell the people of Argentina-_  he sang, looking her in the eye.  
 _I've decided I should decline  
All the honors and titles you've pressed me to take._  
  
Who dangled a solo in someone's face after they'd left, anyway?  
  
 _for I'm contented.  
Let me simply go on-_  
  
Rachel broke in and sang the next two lines. She really couldn't help herself, could she?  
  
 _As the woman who brings her people  
To the heart of Peron._  
  
She snapped her fingers and Brad appeared, looking exactly as vaguely annoyed as ever. Kurt wondered vaguely if the guy might have a life somewhere that didn't involve playing whenever New Directions wanted him to. "From the top," she told him and he began from the intro of the main version of the song. She stared across the piano at Kurt, making very clear from her determined gaze that this was every bit as much a competition as the previous year's had been, even though there were absolutely no stakes but bragging rights and he didn't care nearly as much about proving himself this time.  
  
 _It won't be easy, you'll think it's strange  
When I try to explain how I feel  
That I still need your love after all that I've done_  
  
Kurt broke in on the next line. Rachel could still bring out his competitive nature, even more than he was willing to admit to himself, and he wasn't about to let her sing the entire song so she could say she would have won the solo anyway. Besides, if she was going to make all of her anger at Finn somehow about how  _he_  had betrayed them by leaving McKinley, he was at least going to say his piece.  
  
 _You won't believe me,  
All you will see is a boy you once knew  
Although he's dressed up to the nines,  
At sixes and sevens with you._  
  
He drew in a deep breath and began the second verse. She of all people should understand why he left. She of everyone at that school should have had the second most knowledge of gay issues, and she'd been bullied for most of her educational career so she should have understood that one, too. But if she was really going to be so self-centered that she couldn't understand why on earth he would "abandon" them in favour of going somewhere he could be himself - as though she wouldn't have ditched them all for Vocal Adrenaline the year before if it had occurred to her to do so...  
  
 _I had to let it happen, I had to change  
Couldn't stay all my life down at heel,  
Looking out at the window, staying out of the sun.  
So I chose freedom -  
Running around, trying everything new-_  
  
She cut him off this time to finish out the verse.  
  
 _But nothing impressed me at all,  
I never expected it to._  
  
He contemplated fighting her for the melody on the chorus to prove a point about how she always got the lead, but ultimately realized it took far more skill and talent to create spontaneous harmonies; something Rachel knew virtually nothing about because she always just took the melody and something he had been improving on by leaps and bounds thanks to singing with the Warblers.  
  
 _Don't cry for me, Argentina  
The truth is I never left you  
All through my wild days, my mad existence  
I kept my promise  
Don't keep your distance._  
  
It didn't surprise him when Rachel swooped in on the next verse.  
  
 _And as for fortune, and as for fame  
I never invited them in  
Though it seemed to the world, they were all I desired_  
  
He barely contained a snort. It only seemed to the world that she cared about nothing more than fame and accolades? She who had famously said she was like Tinkerbell because she needed applause to live? She who even now couldn't understand how his decision to transfer was anything other than a personal slight, a swipe at New Directions to get them to lose?  
  
 _They're just illusions,_  he sang, though he didn't expect her to understand.  
 _They're not the solutions they promise to be  
The answer was here all the time_  
  
She took over the last line, in what was beginning to feel like an 'Annie Get Your Gun' moment.  
 _I love you and hope you love me._  
  
At least it saved him from having to make a declaration of love to Rachel Berry. that was a plus.  
  
 _Don't cry for me, Argentina,  
The truth is I never left you_   
  
He descanted around her, in a part much more difficult than singing the same old melody and landing on the G he'd proudly hit during his audition for the Warblers.  _They_  knew what he was capable of.  _They_  didn't just trod him out when they needed someone who sounded like a girl. They actually appreciated his skill - and who he was - in a way that Rachel tried to pretend New Directions did...maybe she actually believed it. That was more disturbing but also more likely. No, he concluded, she really had meant that they needed him to be himself to win; she didn't realize that implied he would ever get to actually use his talents.  
  
 _All through my wild days, my mad existence  
I kept my promise  
Don't keep your distance_  
  
He took the last verse - that one was important enough to fight for and had a killer crescendo that had always been a personal favourite moment of his. Not quite as awesome as the one in Defying Gravity, but damn close.  
  
 _Have I said too much?  
There's nothing more I can think of to say to you  
But all you have to do is look at me to know  
That every word is true!_  
  
Even as much as she'd grown, evolved, gained the ability to see something other than her own self interests, it still wasn't easy for Rachel to admit that someone did something better than she did. Kurt watched as she gave a slight apologetic shrug, a tiny tilt of the head, and offered, "You would have done us proud, singing that at Sectionals."  
  
"Thank you," he replied stiffly.  
  
"I have to admit," she said as she smoothed a dog-earred corner of a piece of sheet music, "I'm impressed by your dedication." When he gave her a questioning look, she explained, "You're probably the only member of New Directions, past or present - other than myself - who would have put in the necessary effort to expand your range upwards like that."  
  
His range wasn't growing upwards; if anything, it was slowly moving down just enough to frustrate him. He was working his ass off in the shower every morning to maintain the strength of his falsetto. But Rachel didn't know that. She thought his range had previously been capped at the E.  
  
"I had the note last year," he stated quietly.  
  
"Kurt..." Her pitying look made him want to start launching insults at her sweater. He restrained himself, but only just. "I know you take a great deal of pride in your voice - as well you should Your talent is rare and you use it incredibly well. But you have enough musical knowledge to realize-"  
  
"I blew it on purpose."  
  
She looked like she couldn't figure out whether he was trying to make an excuse for his poor performance. "Why would you do something like that?"  
  
"Because my father got his first slur-laced phone call." She stared at him, wide-eyed, like she couldn't even comprehend what he could possibly be talking about or how it related to whether or not he sang Defying Gravity. "I'd been getting them for years, beating him to the phone at the shop, intercepting them at home, but he-...it hurt him  _so_  much. I couldn't get up there and sing a girl song entirely in falsetto, not when I knew exactly how much more public ridicule that would bring. Not on me, I was used to it," he added, but she could tell that it didn't mean he wasn't hurt by it. "But on him."  
  
"Kurt..." she murmured. She wanted to hug him, he looked so...sad and resigned. She wasn't used to seeing him like that. Usually he just seemed cold and closed off - or, more recently, happy and open.   
  
"Some things are more important than being a star," he stated with a quiet, firm confidence.  
  
He expected her to throw a fit at that notion. There had never been anything as important to Rachel as being a star. He kind of mocked and envied her for that. She was lucky enough to not realize that some things were too big to combat with the proper ballad. To her, bullying was a slushie in the face or the Cheerios being obnoxious on her MySpace (which had decreased for the most part this year, even with Quinn back to being HBIC). She had been blissfully sheltered by her dads to the point where she was still genuinely shocked and startled by homophobia and had never gotten death threats.   
  
He wished he had the luxury of being that naive.  
  
She stared at him like he had shattered her entire worldview, but like she knew he was being honest. Slowly she walked around the curve of the piano and touched his hand. "I'm going to hug you now, okay?" she asked. He wasn't sure why precisely she always asked first, but he did appreciate the warning instead of her just flinging herself into his arms or something. He nodded and she wrapped her arms tightly around him. The hug was awkward but well-meaning, and he was glad he'd gotten used to people casually touching him again or it might have been too much.  
  
She stepped back and looked up at him. "It's really better at Dalton Academy?"  
  
"Yes," he replied honestly. "No bullying. No homophobia. People can just...be. And music is valued there, it's not like here where we're the lowest rungs on the social ladder."  
  
"It's like your own little 'Zanna, Don't' over there."  
  
Kurt smiled faintly. "Not nearly as gay, but as close as I'm likely to ever find."  
  
"Then..." She drew in a deep breath and looked him over. "...I'm glad you went."  
  
The weight of the admission was obvious to both of them. Kurt squeezed her hand gently and said, "Thank you," which made her smile.  
  
"You should go. Everyone will be here soon and if you're sitting around, not only can we not practice because you're still the competition, but they'll want to spend the entire time talking to you and Sectionals is in two days."  
  
"I understand." He walked down the stairs and started down the center aisle  
  
"Some things are really more important than being a star?" she called after him.  
  
He stopped and looked back at her over his shoulder. "Yes."  
  
She nodded thoughtfully and considered this as Kurt left the auditorium.  
  
* * * * *  
  
After a lovely five-day honeymoon filled with activities they weren't going to be telling the boys about - as well as a few tours and things they could mention in appropriate company - Burt and Carole arrived home on Friday at 5:30. Burt wasn't honestly sure what to expect to find at the house; if it were just Kurt, he could guess pretty well - everything immaculately clean except with an excess of shoes upstairs in the front hall instead of in his room, too much organic food crap in the fridge, and the tv set to the Style network. If it were Finn, he would've guessed the place would look about like his own first apartment before he got married with plenty of takeout boxes strewn across the countertops and empty pop cans (because Finn wasn't that stupid) on every flat surface.  
  
Because it was both boys, he was just hoping the house was still standing and it hadn't degenerated into a war that had Kurt moving out to live with Mercedes in protest. Or, for that matter, that they hadn't just gone to shack up with their respective dates for the week - he knew he would have as a teenager, but he didn't need to think about the boys doing that. Not now, not ever.  
  
What they found as they opened the front door was more surprising than anything they'd envisioned.  
  
Kurt was busily making dinner, Finn was camped out on the couch doing what certainly looked like homework. "So you talked to her?" Finn asked.  
  
"Yes," Kurt replied as slid a pan of rolls into the oven.   
  
"What'd she say, dude?"  
  
"She took out her anger on me, because apparently my betrayal in leaving was worse than yours with Santana a year ago, then she tried to convince me I would have had a solo at Sectionals."  
  
"But why'd that mean giving up her last solo and letting Santana pick any song she wanted? I mean, she's  _Rachel_ , she's like a major controller and barely let Mercedes do 'And I'm Telling You,' and that was after she sang it for everyone. Why would she throw it like that?"  
  
"Can you give me a hand with this?" Kurt asked as he began to carve the roast. The electric knife was ancient and required a firm two-handed grip, which didn't leave any hands to make sure the pan didn't move.  
  
"Sure, dude." Finn set down the book that he may or may not have been actually studying from and strode into the kitchen. "Whatcha need?"  
  
"Hold the pan like so," Kurt requested, and Finn complied.  
  
The two adults stared at each other, then glanced at their sons, then back at each other. A week left to their own devices and they had gotten downright chummy instead of turning into, well, Cain and Abel?  
  
How the hell had that happened?  
  
"I told her some things were more important than being a star," Kurt said simply. He didn't feel like explaining the entire backstory to Finn, if only because it would take far longer to tell than it would take for the rolls to be done and he still had to make sure the vegetables were cooking.  
  
"Wait. And she believed that?"  
  
"Apparently."  
  
When there was no further conversation, Carole decided it was an appropriate time to announce their return.  
  
* * * * *  
  
Scheduling for the night before Sectionals had proved to be a nightmare. Rehearsal until 4:15 with instructions to make an early night of it, driving home to finish making family dinner (thank god for the slow roaster), dinner at 6, then driving an hour over to Blaine's to spend the night so he wouldn't have to wake up at like 4 a.m. in order to get over to Dalton in time for their 6:30 warmup in time to catch the bus over to the competition.  
  
Times like this he missed going to school near his house.  
  
He pulled into the driveway when instructed to do so by his GPS. When he glanced up to check the address, he was faced with a larger house than he'd ever seen before outside of movies and gossip magazines and the reception hall in Dayton where his great-aunt's second wedding had been held. He could only count two stories but it somehow seemed taller, and with its long veranda and portico it looked like the Southfork Ranch from old reruns he'd seen of "Dallas." The garage attached to the left side of the house seemed bigger than his own home and would easily have fit four cars.  
  
He parked off to the side where he hoped he wouldn't be in anyone's way, then stepped out of the vehicle and straightened his clothes. He knew logically that most of the guys at Dalton were from financially well-off families - with how much the school cost and how few scholarships were awarded every year, it was simple arithmetic. But it hadn't occurred to him until that moment just how much below average his family was. Or that this was an area in which Blaine was decidedly unlike him.  
  
He pulled his secondhand Pierre Cardin luggage from the trunk and drew in a deep breath before wheeling it to the front door. The doorbell didn't chime the same two notes as every suburban bell he'd ever heard, but a lilting melody that Kurt suspected would get really annoying after awhile but was kind of impressive the first time. He was half-convinced he had the wrong house when Blaine pulled open the door.  
  
It hadn't occurred to him until that moment that he hadn't yet seen Blaine out of the Dalton uniform. Even when they hung out outside of school, even when Blaine had taken him for coffee or lunch before he started at Dalton, he'd only ever seen the guy in school clothes. If he'd had to pick out Blaine's style, he wouldn't have been able to do it...but somehow the well-fitting jeans and Armani Exchange with a zippered cardigan, complete with glasses and tossled curly hair, suited him perfectly.  
  
"Hey," Blaine grinned. "C'mon in. You found it okay?" He took one of Kurt's bags and carried it into the house. Kurt followed dutifully, trying not to gape at the entryway with its vaulted 20-foot ceilings and grand curved staircase. There were crystals hanging from the sconces, for crying out loud.  
  
Oh god. With a house like this...Blaine could afford designer clothes at retail price, couldn't he? Instead of scouring secondhand shops and eBay and online collector/devotee websites and sewing the rest from remnants of mallstore castoffs. With the exception of his blue Marc Jacobs coat, which was a sweet 16 present from the maternal grandmother who saw him only in Christmas card photos his father dutifully sent every year, there wasn't a single designer piece of his wardrobe that hadn't been thrifted somehow; he suspected the same was not true of Blaine.  
  
Suddenly he felt very small and gauche.  
  
Blaine seemed oblivious to it all. He would, Kurt supposed, what with it being his house and everything. "You wanna hang out down here or camp out in my room?" he asked. He nodded first beyond the stairs, then up, and Kurt wasn't sure he could take whatever grand living room was over there. Bedrooms were at least a little more humanizing than the kind of slightly-tacky opulence he'd seen thus far. Plus the bedroom would be more  _Blaine_  and less...Blaine's as-of-yet-unseen parents.  
  
"Your room's fine," Kurt replied awkwardly.  
  
"Cool." He took the garment bag from Kurt's hand and carried it upstairs, then down a long hallway. Kurt wondered what the closed doors led to - a couple bedrooms, probably, though he knew Blaine just had an older sister at college, so there probably weren't too many places a person would need to sleep. The house was big enough they might have a gift-wrapping room, like Aaron Spelling.   
  
Blaine's room was only slightly larger than Kurt's basement, which was reassuring, and not all that stylistically different. A lot darker - meaning it was probably physically bigger than it appeared and just  _seemed_  smaller, but Kurt ignored that - with low, modern charcoal grey suede couches and aluminum-y walls and what looked like a large slab of nearly-black marble against one wall. "I was going for a Tom Ford thing - the store in Milan," Blaine offered with an apologetic smile.  
  
Kurt's eyes lit up. "I almost redid my basement last year to look like his house in Bel Air. Then one tragic design choice led to another and the entire vision changed and...it ultimately didn't turn out so well. But I'd still love to."  
  
"Oh, it's great. With all the sleek black and white with punches of wood?"  
  
"Exactly."  
  
Blaine pulled out one of the couches into a bed and laid Kurt's garment bag across the other one. "Bathroom's through there if you want to put your stuff." Kurt nodded and carried his oversized toiletry case in, wondering if there might be enough space to actually put any of his products-  
  
And was greeted by an assortment even larger than his own.  
  
Okay, so Blaine's giant house didn't make him so different. More like...Kurt's dreamworld, was all. He almost laughed, and Blaine came to investigate. "What?" he asked.  
  
"I've never seen anyone with a larger collection of product than mine," Kurt replied.  
  
Blaine smiled, looking just a touch embarrassed, and ran a hand through his curly hair, then glanced upward at the tips of the ringlets. "It has to be beaten into submission in the morning," he offered, and Kurt grinned.   
  
"I understand," he replied with a nod to his bag.   
  
"You ate already, right? The dinner thing you mentioned?"  
  
"Yeah," Kurt replied. He lined up a few of the bottles he wanted to make sure remained upright, then set the rest of the bag on the edge of the sink. "Family dinner, every Friday night."  
  
"It kind of sucks you couldn't get out of it - you had to drive all the way back, then here again?"  
  
"I don't try to get out of them," Kurt stated solemnly.  
  
"Why not?" Blaine asked. "Whenever my parents try to get me to go to some dinner I do everything I can to-"  
  
"It's different. Last time I tried my father literally had a massive heart attack and arrhythmia."  
  
Blaine's face fell. "Well that's awkward," he said. Kurt smiled very faintly and Blaine reached out to touch his hand. "I'm sorry. I didn't realize-"  
  
"It's okay," Kurt replied quietly. Something about the feeling of Blaine's hand in his was...  
'comforting' seemed like the wrong word, too familial, but 'electric' didn't begin to describe it.   
  
"C'mon - let's go watch something campy and make fun of it all night. It'll help us relax before tomorrow," Blaine urged. He led Kurt back to the bedroom and pulled open what had looked like a slab of marble to reveal an entertainment center with a huge DVD collection that was as varied as it was voluminous. Everything from frat-boy classics Kurt recognized from Finn's collection, to romantic comedies (apparently Blaine liked Sandra Bullock), to an assortment of musicals and gay classics. "Ever seen 'A Touch of Pink'?" he asked. When Kurt shook his head, Blaine replied, "Oh you have to! The guy who played the impotent husband in 'Sex and the City' doing a bad Cary Grant, and a big Bollywood wedding, and the boyfriend is English and really cute."  
  
"Sounds good," Kurt replied as he sat. Blaine put in the movie, then sat beside him - with just enough distance that things didn't seem too weird.  
  
"I'm sorry for what I said," Blaine offered as the previews rolled and he was too lazy to fastforward past them. "I'm used to dinner with my parents being strictly a business thing to be avoided at all costs. Some ridiculous political figure for whom I have to be perfectly charming and neither too teenagerish nor too gay while I watch my dad try to schmooze his way into whatever he's being paid to get support for and my mom just looks all thoughtful and earnest."  
  
"So he's...?"  
  
"A lobbyist. Not for any one cause or anything, he'll do both sides if he can swing it. The man has no principles, no soul." Blaine shook his head. "They mostly just leave me alone now. As long as I don't cause any trouble, they let me do whatever I want."  
  
He said it like it was a good thing, but at the same time...Kurt recognized the kind of lonely look. The house was large, gorgeous, and empty. And quiet, except for them.  
  
Maybe it wasn't as different from things he knew as he'd thought.  
  
The settled in to watch the movie in comfortable quasi-silence until Kurt's phone chirped midway through the film. "Hi, Puck," Blaine teased.  
  
"How'd you-"  
  
"The ringtone," Blaine replied as Kurt pulled out his phone.  
  
 _Cum ovr_  
  
Kurt typed back,  _I can't. I'm at Blaine's for the night._  
  
There was a long pause, then a response,  _but im horny_  
  
Kurt rolled his eyes and shook his head.  _So am I, but I have to be at Dalton too early tomorrow. I'll see you before the competition?_  
  
When the ambivalent reply ("wutevs")came, Kurt rolled his eyes again and pocketed his phone.   
  
"What was that?" Blaine asked.  
  
"Nothing," he replied as he slid into a more comfortable position on the couch, a few inches closer to Blaine than he had been. "Let's keep watching."


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you've seen the video of the Warblers at Sectionals, you'll notice some of it's different; after all, Kurt's been at Dalton for quite awhile longer in this verse than in canon and so forth...but I kept some of the moments I loved. You'll see.

Part of the game of pre-Sectionals waiting was trying to scope out the competition without letting them get a good look at you. That was easier to do if you weren't already in your costume.  
  
Or wearing a school uniform. It was pretty easy to tell that a group of 20 guys in the same coat, shirt, tie, and slacks, with a big D crest emblazoned on the blazer, were probably the team from Dalton Academy.  
  
For that matter, it was pretty easy to find the Hipsters, too - they looked like a square dance team or something, in their vests and skirts and slacks with the little neck scarves.   
  
"Aw, man, it's gonna be like trying to beat my grandmother or something," Wes groaned as they walked through the lobby.  
  
"What happens if one of them has a stroke onstage or something?" David asked.  
  
"Am I the only one trying to figure out which of the Golden Girls each of them would be?" Charlie asked.  
  
Kurt was about to deny ever thinking it, even though he did have a personal Betty White picked out, when Blaine nodded towards one and said, "She's gotta be Blanche."  
  
"You think?" Charlie asked, tilting his head.  
  
"Yeah. Look at the way she's touching that guy's arm, the way the taller lady's looking at them like she wants to rip the woman's hand off. Definitely Blanche."  
  
Kurt peeled off, wanting to get some air before the heaviness of the competition set in. Checking his watch, he doubted his dad and Carole were there yet, though Finn and the rest of his friends were probably lurking there somewhere. He walked towards the backstage area where they'd been told the green rooms were - they were off stage left, the Hipsters off stage left, and New Directions down the only corridor without stairs. Originally that room had been slated for the Hipsters in the name of accessibility, but it turned out that the old people could still manage stairs better than Artie could.  
  
A hand reached out of the darkness and grabbed him, and he let out a shrill noise of surprise - not really a scream but more than a squeak - before a familiar voice said, "Calm down, don't pull a vocal cord or something."  
  
Kurt smiled and turned to find himself face-to-face with Puck. "Hi."  
  
"You made it here, I see," Puck replied coolly as he looked Kurt up and down. He'd seen Kurt in the uniform only once before, and even then it was under some fancy coat that no one but Kurt would ever actually own so he didn't really  _see_  most of it.   
  
He didn't know why the guy looked so hot in something that looked so fucking stupid. And in something that made him look  _twelve_. It made him kind of feel like a creeper, especially since the fantasy he'd had about uniforms was definitely Catholic school  _girls_  instead of geeky prep-school boys, but something about the outfit on Kurt was doing all kinds of things for him.  
  
"Yeah," Kurt replied, almost shivering under Puck's gaze.  
  
"Missed you last night," he said. Okay, maybe it was the week of not fucking that was doing it more than the uniform. Mostly the absence and just a little bit the clothes maybe.   
  
"Sorry. I thought I'd told you - because I had to be there so early-"  
  
Puck slid his hand along Kurt's jaw and pulled the shorter guy towards him for a hot, needy kiss. Not needy like some pathetic 'I'm so in love with you I need you or I'll die' crap in the stupid movies on that "Television for Women" channel (why wasn't there a "Television for Men" channel, anyway? Like, yeah, there was ESPN and all that, and Spike TV, but something with it right there in the name). Needy like 'I'm about to rip all your clothes off because I need to fuck you right here right now.'  _That_  kind of needy. Kurt whimpered softly in surprise, though he probably should have expected that by now, and wrapped one arm around Puck's back; the other hand came to rest at the front of Puck's jeans, two fingers hooked under the fabric of the waistband.  
  
Puck quirked an eyebrow. Excellent. They were on the same page with that, then.  
  
He pulled back and Kurt immediately moved in for another kiss - even better. "Wait a sec," Puck instructed as he led Kurt through another dark corridor and past an emergency exit to a mostly-empty walk-in closet containing a handful of janitorial supplies. Probably best if he didn't tell Kurt that he knew of its location because Santana had tried to drag him into it earlier in the day.  
  
As he pulled open the door, Kurt looked unimpresed. "Really?" he asked, deadpan. "A broom closet? I would think that you of all people could appreciate something a little less... _cliche_."  
  
"You look tense - you wanna fix that or not?" Puck asked with a smirk, and when Kurt rolled his eyes fondly, he reached out and grasped the stupid red and blue striped tie - both ends so he wouldn't accidentally strangle the guy - and pulled Kurt towards him, which resulted in more eyerolling and mumbling about how Kurt swore he'd seen this on Queer as Folk.   
  
Kurt tugged the door shut behind them and moaned softly as Puck's lips crashed down on his. It had definitely been too fucking long - between the lead-up to the wedding, rehearsals all week, some kind of extra practices for a football playoff something that Kurt couldn't identify but knew it meant Finn was out of the house a lot too...they'd barely gotten to make out in weeks, let alone do anything more than that. And going back to his hand after getting used to Puck's was seriously disappointing, if only because that also meant a lack of Puck's dick anywhere near him.  
  
Now the possibilities were almost too many and he wanted them  _all_  and knew they had maybe 20 minutes if he was lucky. Even with Puck's nearly-nonexistent refractory period and the fact that they knew what got each other off like clockwork by now, still not enough time for a couple rounds.  
  
That would have to wait for the after party. Or better yet - celebratory sex for one of them, consolation sex for the other. They were pretty good at both of them.  
  
Puck let out a soft grunt as Kurt pushed him backwards against one of the shelves and leaned up on his toes to kiss him. The slight angle it put him at, with his feet a few inches away from the wall, meant Kurt was practically laying against him while the guy shoved his tongue into his mouth - even though they were both standing up - and the friction it created each time the hollow beside Kurt's hipbone pressed against the tight crotch of his jeans was just enough to make his breathing heavier. He used one hand to unbutton the blazer and moved the other to cup Kurt's ass, smirking as it caused Kurt to grind forward against his thigh.  
  
He shoved Kurt's jacket off his shoulders as far as he could, and as Kurt leaned back to shrug out of it the rest of the way, Puck finally got what he'd found hot about the uniform. Not the guy in it, not the all buttoned-up thing, no. The completely  _debauched_  way the guy in it looked when he was halfway out of it. Pink slightly-swollen lips parted as he sucked in breath, cheeks flushed, hair already mussed in a way that Puck knew would drive him crazy when he looked in a mirror later, with the tie loosened and completely askew, jacket shrugged off, and the too-tight trousers and off-center belt...Kurt looked like every sex fantasy stereotype and they hadn't gotten past first base yet.  
  
Okay, not really, at least. Technically the whole humping thing was probably meant to be like third, but with two guys it just kind of happened that way and tended to definitely precede any other touching.   
  
He could barely restrain himself long enough to let Kurt neatly fold the jacket and lay it over the least dusty thing he could find - a stepladder - before he dragged Kurt back to him by the small of his back, nibbling on Kurt's lower lip.  
  
Kurt slipped from Puck's grasp and practically slithered down his body onto his knees. He hoped the dust would come out of his pants; that would look really bad onstage, bad enough that he contemplated not doing it but he was literally  _craving_  the sensation of Puck's cock in his mouth so badly he didn't care about his clothes.  
  
Yes, it even shocked him. That was how long it had been.   
  
He flicked open Puck's jeans and lowered the zipper, fishing out his erection. He unconsciously licked his lip, and Puck's breath caught. "Shit," Puck groaned, staring down at him with the mouth and the hot eyes.   
  
Kurt realized what was missing and whimpered in protest, then glanced up to see Kurt holding a gold packet between his first two fingers. When he reached up to grab it, Puck held it higher - just out of reach. "Other plans," he smirked. While he was never one to turn down head - especially as good as Kurt could give it particularly when he looked like  _that_  - there was something else he wanted more.  
  
He helped Kurt stand and ran his fingers roughly through the hair at the back of Kurt's neck, locking eyes with him. Kurt's breath hitched at the look in Puck's eyes, like he wanted to fuck him through the floor for days on end. Puck's fingers expertly unfastened his belt and trousers, and they fell to his ankles as soon as Kurt gave a quick twitch of his hips. Puck smirked and reached down the back of his silky boxerbriefs, index finger sliding slowly down between the cheeks; when Kurt's moans went from soft to desperate, he knew he was in the right place.  
  
The lack of lube concerned him; the condom was pre-lubed, which he knew was better than nothing but still not ideal...but probably enough. Should be, anyway. It just meant going a little slower - that would actually be the bigger problem.  
  
He turned Kurt away from him and nudged him towards the shelves. While Puck opened the condom and smoothed it down the length, Kurt shoved down his underwear and gripped the shelves as best he could, hands shoulder-width apart, fingers trying to curl into the rough wood. His breathing was uneven, a little forced, in nervous anticipation and sexual frustration that seemed to increase by the minute.  
  
Puck splayed one hand across Kurt's hip, where shirt-tail met soft pale flesh, and used the other hand to guide his way up and in. Kurt gasped and his head fell back slightly, eyes closed. Before Puck could ask if he was okay, he murmured, "keep going." He would've pressed back but there wasn't a good way to manage that in this position.  
  
In truth, it was one of those positions that definitely worked better on tv and was really something that only worked even then if the people were almost the same height, and if the thing they were facing didn't involve shelves or splinters, but it still felt good  _enough_  even with all the discomfort, and he'd missed the sound of Puck groaning in his ear way too fucking much over the past couple weeks, and he  _was_  pretty tense.  
  
Puck reached around to stroke him, the fingers of his other hand tightening on Kurt's hip, and Kurt knew he wouldn't last long. He vaguely hoped he managed to avoid getting anything on the pants that were still bunched up around his ankles, but the majority of his thoughts were on the sharp jerk of Puck's hips against his and moaned proclamations to a being he didn't believe in.  
  
The weight of Puck slumped against his back after he came, the heat radiating even through two layers of shirts...he made a mental note to definitely never go this long without Puck again. He had a way of forgetting how even the not-entirely-sexual touches associated with sex made him feel almost dizzy in the best way - like the adrenaline high after a really amazing star performance.  
  
That wasn't even getting into the fuzzy feeling that he got from the tender kiss Puck planted just behind his ear as he pulled out.  
  
"Needed that," Puck said, and Kurt knew there was a tone Puck could have said it in that would have made him feel like the dirtiest, cheapest whore, but...it was different. He'd known Puck long enough now, and well enough, that he got what the guy meant without needing a lot of explanation or anything.  
  
"I missed you," Kurt replied. He bent to pull up his clothes and blushed faintly as he realized Puck was shamelessly ogling him. His pants were slightly dusty but nothing a good brush off and a few quick dabs with a damp paper towel couldn't fix.He tucked in his shirt and fastened his belt, then turned to grab his jacket.  
  
"Hang on." Puck reached out to tighten and strengthen his tie, and Kurt placed his hands gently over Puck's, smiling faintly. "There. Figured without a mirror or whatever..."  
  
"Thank you." Kurt ran this thumb over Puck's. "And break a leg today."  
  
"You too."   
  
Kurt grabbed his jacket, put it on, and smoothed it. His hair was a mess, he knew, but he had product in his bag. He'd have time to fix everything before they actually went on. He turned to open the door-  
  
And it wouldn't budge.   
  
"Oh God," Kurt whispered. "It's stuck!" He frantically tried to open the door; Blaine was going to  _kill_  him-  
  
Puck rolled his eyes and placed his hands over Kurt's to still them. "Let me." When Kurt moved his hands away, Puck jerked up on the handle sharply, jiggled it twice, and the door flew open.   
  
Of course Blaine picked the moment the two of them stumbled out of the suddenly-opened door to walk by. He barely repressed a grin as he said, "About time you came out of the closet, isn't it, Puck?"  
  
Puck's smile faded into a hard glare as he took in the guy who was obviously Kurt's teammate; the uniform was pretty hard to miss. He thought he recognized the dude from the parking lot the other day, when the group had tagged along to ostensibly check him out - and had liked what they'd seen, from the looks of it, but who wouldn't?   
  
Kurt blushed but did his best to cover it - which wasn't very good. "Puck, meet Blaine."  
  
Ahhh. So  _this_  was the guy who'd kept Puck's balls blue the night before. The guy whose name came up in like every conversation Kurt had these days - more often than Mercedes or Finn or every single other person at Dalton combined. Puck looked him up and down; he wasn't impressed. "Prep-school geek" didn't begin to describe it. The dude was a total loser and would've gotten tossed in the dumpster in ten seconds back when he ruled the school with his iron fist of judgment. Unless he was secretly a gym freak under the uniform and stupid hair gel, Puck didn't have anything to worry about. Not if Kurt had eyes or half a brain, and from his experience Kurt definitely had both.  
  
"Nice to meet you. Kurt talks about you all the time," Blaine replied with a smile as he stuck out his hand, and Puck looked at it warily - what teenager freaking shook hands? How lame was that? He did it to be nice so Kurt wouldn't whine at him the rest of the night, but seriously.   
  
"Yeah, you too."  
  
"I was coming to find you - we've gotta go start warm-ups," Blaine told Kurt, then added to Puck, "You guys break a leg today."  
  
"You too," Puck replied as Kurt and Blaine took off down a backstage corridor towards their greenroom, wherever it was.  
  
There was no ostensible reason he should dislike the guy. Other than the guy being a loser but whatever - he could live with that. Artie wasn't exactly that cool and he liked him well enough. But that was a team thing, and this guy was definitely not on his team. He didn't have to be nice to him, or like him, or want anything to do with him.  
  
Especially as long as Kurt spent time over at prepdork's house instead of his. He would totally hold a grudge over missed blowjobs.  
  
* * * * *  
  
Will walked through the lobby and wove his way through the throngs of people on his way to snag a bottle of water before the first performance. Seeing the long line at concessions, he contemplated skipping it altogether, but it was going to be a long few hours and the line would probably be even longer after the Hipsters were done with their portion of the show.  
  
He glanced to see if the next line over was any shorter and found himself staring at a familiar man in all-black with a snooty expression. While it wasn't unusual for coaches in other sections to go check out the competition in case their team advanced to Regionals - while he hadn't done it, he knew Shelby Corcoran had seen them the year before at Sectionals - he had to wonder about the red crested D lapel pin the coach was wearing. It looked like the logo he had seen on the Dalton boys' jackets while they meandered their way through the lobby and auditorium.   
  
Why would the coach of Vocal Adrenaline try to disguise his presence by wearing another team's crest? And wouldn't that be taking a pretty big risk, because if the Warblers' coach saw it and asked who he was-  
  
Who was the Warblers' coach, anyway?  
  
Will pulled the program out of his jacket pocket and flipped open to the team roster. Right there between J. Wayne, the coach of the Hipsters, and his own name, he saw it.  
  


> **The Warblers**  
>  Dalton Academy
> 
> Dustin Goolsby  
>  _Director_

  
  
That couldn't be allowed, right?  
  
He stepped out of line and walked over to the registration table. "Excuse me, is there an extra copy of the rulebook lying around here somewhere?"   
  
"Probably. Why?"  
  
"Just want to make sure everything's within the rules. We had a new student join our team and I don't want to miss anything, y'know. Have my poor paperwork jeopardize things for the kids."  
  
The woman smiled sweetly up at him, dug under the table fro a minute, then handed him a copy. "Student qualifications start around page 13 or 14, if I remember right. It's right after the section on coaches."  
  
"Thanks," he replied and took the book with an appreciate smile, then looked around for a secluded place to try to read it. He ducked into a stairwell to the right of the lobby and began to thumb through.   
  
There was always a chance Sue was behind this, and she was nothing if not thorough on rule-following. She knew the show choir handbook better than he did at this point, or practically so. But on the off chance this was someone else screwing with them, they might have broken a rule somewhere, or at least done something he could use to put a stop to this.  
  
  
* * * * *  
  
  
When Kurt had transferred to Dalton more than a month ago, he had known logically that this day was coming. He had known there was a decent chance that either he would lose to his friends' benefit or win at their expense, he had known he'd be competing against people he cared about and whose strengths and weaknesses he knew better than his own. He had refused to play doubleagent for the Warblers - or for Finn, for that matter - and had done his best to prepare himself for the fairest, fiercest competition he could.  
  
What he hadn't counted on was seeing them before he went on.  
  
He had been to enough of these competitions (well, two of them) to know that there was a decent intermission between each of the three groups, and as much as you were meant to kind of stay in the greenroom or in the audience, it was hard not to wander around and try to scope out the competition. It was too tempting - they were right there and all. So when he went in search of the bathroom immediately after the Hipsters finished their set (cute little old people, the song made him want to find his dad in the audience and hug him for dear life, but probably not serious competition for either of the other two groups), he should have known that - with his luck - he would manage to run into like half his former team. Plus Lauren Zizes.  
  
Seriously?  _That_  was his replacement? They couldn't even be bothered to replace him with Jacob ben Israel, he was seriously enough of a girl that he got  _Lauren freaking Zizes_?   
  
Not only that, but they'd had like five, almost six weeks to replace him, and she was all the better they could come up with?  
  
"Hey, Kurt!" Sam called as he spotted him. Damn the fake-blond and his enthusiasm. There was no escaping now; Mercedes was already on her way over, along with Tina and Quinn. He tried to focus on anything other than their nervous-but-beaming faces, but everything he thought of seemed like a reminder of how separate he was from them now. Even fixating on their costume choices - a nice change from all-black for the boys, though he wasn't sure the maroon really worked on Mike, and dresses that he liked a lot better than the ones Rachel had shoved the girls into for Regionals - just reinforced that he wasn't in the same costume. He was in his uniform. He wasn't part of them anymore. He was their competition now.  
  
"You look like mailboxes," Brittany stated, and he wasn't sure what that meant but he went with it.   
  
"How in the world do you deal with wearing a uniform?" Tina asked as she looked him up and down.  
  
Kurt swallowed hard. "I've gotta go - we're up next."  
  
"You guys kick butt out there, okay?" Mercedes encouraged.   
  
"Good luck," Sam said, oblivious to the dirty looks everyone shot him.  
  
"Break a leg," Kurt corrected.  
  
"Dude, I already broke my shoulder, what else do you-"  
  
"Thank you," Kurt allowed finally with a faint smile.  
  
Quinn squeezed his hand and leaned in to kiss his cheek. "Just like Nationals," she told him with a knowing look. He knew she meant Cheerios - she'd been the first call on his cell congratulating him after their win, after his 14-minute solo, but for some reason all he could think of was...  
  
If he won, they would never get to New York. If he won, their season was  _over_.  
  
He practically dashed backstage to rejoin his team, which was abuzz with adrenaline, nervous energy, ready to go sing their hearts out and beat the other two groups. He wasn't sure what he wanted anymore.  
  
Oh God, what was he doing?  
  
From backstage he could see the lights flash and dim in the auditorium, and Blaine grinned. "Let's go, guys." They filed onstage behind the closed curtain and took their places on the risers as the din of the audience slowly faded, then went nearly silent. "Pitch," he requested quietly, and Ethan - who was kind of a freak with his perfect pitch memory - hummed their keynote. The Warblers hummed the same note quietly, then broke to their actual pitches for the song, all softly enough for only each other to hear. They were well-practiced at this.  
  
The curtain rose on the darkened auditorium and they began the song. Kurt was lucky he remembered what he was meant to be singing - he felt lost, all he could think about was his former teammates, his best friends out there in the audience whose dreams rested in large part on him. On him and his new team and how  _they_  performed. Why had he done this? Left them, abandoned them like - he could have picked any school in the state and he had to pick the one he already knew was going to compete against them? He couldn't have found a school, any other school, that would have let him joint he choir but not required him to betray the only people who had even come close to having his back for a year?  
  
He barely managed to keep himself from glancing awkwardly at the audience out of the corner of his eye as Blaine began his solo. Show face, he reminded himself. He'd been performing long enough he should at least be able to do that much on auto-pilot, kind of like he'd been performing long enough that he  _should_  know how to leave it all offstage and kick ass when he was actually meant to be putting on a show.  
  
 _Your lipstick stains  
On the front lobe of my left side brains  
I knew I wouldn't forget you-_  
  
As Blaine crossed in his direction, he winked his upstage eye, a kind of 'c'mon, relax, have fun' gesture that Kurt tried to return with a smile; it was lopsided and kind of half-assed but sincere, at any rate.  
  
 _And so I went and let you  
Blow my mind._  
  
In the audience, Puck was none too pleased with the kind of playful winking thing the punk with the lame-ass name had going on with Kurt. Yeah, Kurt was free to do what he wanted with who he wanted, but couldn't he at least have some  _taste_  about it? This guy? Really?  
  
 _Your sweet moonbeam,  
The smell of you in every single dream I dream-_  
  
He missed a step and it drove him crazy. He was going to ruin this for the Warblers if he kept this up - the guys who had taken him in and treated him like a brother when they had no reason to other than Blaine's word, when they'd only met him in the first place because he'd been spying on them. They befriended him and treated him with so much respect and dignity and honest-to-god friendship he didn't even know how to thank them for it, and now he was going to fuck up  _both_  team's chances by blowing it?  
  
 _I knew when we collided,  
You're the one I have decided  
Who's one of my kind_  
  
He needed to focus. He needed to remember why he was doing this in the first place. His safety, for one. And his dad - his dad, who worried about him too much and already had heart problems at all of 45 years old, who would do anything to protect him but couldn't send him to a safe school absent the music scholarship that was paying the way. That was something he could go with, someone he could win for without feeling like he was betraying any of his friends. His dad. That worked.   
  
...If he could just find him in the audience.   
  
 _Hey, soul sister,  
Ain't that Mr. Mister  
On the radio, stereo,  
The way you move ain't fair you know_  
  
The stage lights were blinding, but he was practiced enough that he could usually at least spot the outline of his father's baseball cap - he'd managed at Regionals, at any rate - and the longer he stared at the audience the easier it was to see.   
  
Instead, of course, his eyes fell on the members of New Directions, seated in their row right there in the center.  
  
He saw Mr. Schue first, sitting behind them, half-glowering at him with a kind of disappointed glare of an expression. Okay, not helpful.  
  
Then he saw Rachel. Sitting there next to Finn with a giant forced smile and gesturing and mouthing for him to smile. She was stage-mothering him and it made something in him melt - even freaking  _Rachel_  was happy for him and wanted him to do well? Rachel was even more obsessed with New York than he was - which was saying a lot - and still one of the most competitive and self-interested people he'd ever met, despite her recent moves away from that. But there she was, telling him to 'show face' and smile and looked like she wanted to come up there and shake him and tell him to do his best because she knew he was better than that.  
  
He could've kissed her.  
  
Okay, not really. He could've hugged her without asking permission first, that was big enough.  
  
And Mercedes in front of her, and Tina, and Quinn and Sam and Brittany...even Mike and Artie were all smiling and kind of grooving to the music. Finn had the look on his face like the next words out of his mouth would be "Dude, you rock this" or something equally encouraging in straight-boy-ese.  
  
They were happy for him. He wasn't betraying them or destroying their chances. They were his friends and happy for him to be up there and singing and  _happy_  in his own life for the first time in a very long while.   
  
He drew in a deep breath and stepped forward to join Blaine while Erek shifted into the center behind the two of them. They'd originally done the bridge as more of Blaine's solo with backup, but he decided after Kurt joined them it might make a nice duet, and while Kurt had protested on the grounds of his newness ("You guys have been doing this song for months, I would be swooping in"), the consensus was that his harmonies added something - and his sincerity added a lot more. They danced across the stage, even as Kurt felt kind of like a metaphor for something really awkward.  
  
 _The way you can cut a rug,  
Watching you's the only drug  
I need  
So gangsta, I'm so thug,  
You're the only one I'm dreaming of, you see,_  
  
Every time Blaine sang the gangsta line he did this rubber-faced comedian thing that made Kurt almost crack up, so by the time they even got the word 'need' he was already grinning.  
  
"Who knew he could harmonize below someone?" Artie leaned over and whispered to Mercedes. His line was, for the most part, a third below Blaine's (with the occasional harmonic deviation, of course) and his voice sounded strong and sure and blended really well.   
  
"Cheerios stuff. But boy's never had a solo in competition before," she pointed out with a proud smile as she watched him. Technically a duet, but it was still more spotlight than he'd ever gotten with New Directions; he'd had a line slated for "Don't Stop Believing" at Regionals, but the whole verse had gotten cut in the interest of time when they rearranged the mashup on the day before the competition. As much as she complained about only ever getting brought out to wail on the high notes at the end, it was still more than Kurt ever got and she knew it pissed him off even if he didn't usually say it.   
  
 _I can be myself here finally,_  Kurt sang with overwhelming pride and relief and - okay, he would say it -  _glee_  at the truth behind the words. This was his home now, these people, these guys...and being one's self could never be a betrayal.  
 _In fact there's nothing I can't be  
I want the world to see you be with me_  
  
Rachel was beaming so hard her cheeks hurt as she clung to Finn's hand. "He's so happy," she whispered to no one in particular, but Finn glanced at her, smiled, and nodded.  
  
Then she noticed Puck's glare in front of her. He was staring at the stage like he wanted to light it on fire with nothing more than his eyeballs and highly combustible rage. She thought Puck supported Kurt going to Dalton - at least, now that they were back together again. She wasn't supposed to know they had ever broken up, but she  _was_  dating Kurt's stepbrother now and Finn was horrible at keeping secrets that didn't involve his own moronic choices. At any rate, they were back together now, so she didn't understand why Puck was-  
  
...staring at their lead singer like that.  
  
 _Oh._  
  
Kurt  _was_  looking kind of flirty with their version of Jesse. And she had excellent gaydar thanks to her many years of training with friends of her two gay dads, and the boy Puck was glaring at was most definitely gay.   
  
But that wasn't the point. Right now, the  _point_  was encouraging Kurt to do his best and making sure he knew that they as a club didn't harbour any ill-will against him. She kicked the back of his chair with the toe of her loafer and he turned to glare at her. "Don't be a jerk," she hissed. He just rolled his eyes and went back to staring at the stage.  
  
 _Hey soul sister,  
Ain't that Mr. Mister  
On the radio, stereo  
The way you move ain't fair you know  
Hey soul sister,  
I don't wanna miss  
A single thing you do  
Tonight_  
  
By the time they began half-skipping - okay, the other guys began dancing and he began half-skipping because no amount of dance practice could make him look anything other than awkward when going for an improved-style dance. He could do precision, he could do Beyonce and Cheerios and Gaga, but this kind of thing he was going to seem uncoordinated no matter how hard he tried - towards the center of the stage and back up the risers to get into their final position, Kurt felt pretty good about it. The shaky beginning wasn't his proudest moment, but his duet in the middle more than made up for it and the rest of the guys were flawless, so they had a good shot. They really did. At the very least it should be a fair fight.  
  
 _Tonight._


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. This was written "blind" - as in, before the episode aired. So if I got something wrong, it might be accidental or might be intentional and you'll never know, will you? ;)
> 
> 2\. As an exception to the note above - I knew from the previews and program pics that "Dog Days are Over" wasn't going to be on the big stage at Sectionals. But I think it had an important role in this story, and for character relationships, so it's in their competition bit. Besides, two almost-entirely-solo songs as the entire thing they used for the competition? No thanks.
> 
> 3\. I'm fairly certain they changed one of the lyrics in "Dog Days" and I like it better the way it sounds on the Glee recording as far as what it's saying. If you can't tell where the for/from are swapped, then I'm not going to point it out to you; if you can, then don't send me hate mail because it's totally Tina's fault.
> 
> 4\. And finally. There are places in this I've skipped sections or lyrics or whatever to keep the pace going and just deal with the important ones. No, I didn't forget like 3/4 of that song, it's just that I've done what I wanted to and am moving on in the interest of not making this chapter 12,000 words. ...Yeah. I think that's it.

The usual Mr. Schue pep-talk in the green room made Puck roll his eyes to the point where it felt like his eye sockets literally hurt. Going out there to sing and prove they weren't alone? Who the hell thought they were alone? There were, like, twelve of them, and even if no one liked that Zizes chick, it wasn't like everyone in that room wasn't at least dating someone.  
  
Except Mercedes. Kinda sucked for her.  
  
Even Rachel and Finn were back to being all sappy and googoo-eyed after the whole thing with Santana. Apparently Finn was worth exactly one crappy solo, since Rachel kept saying something about how something were more important than being a star, and she got back together with Finn the same day she gave up her weird Broadway song about crying in Argentina (Kurt probably knew it, Puck knew, but he didn't care enough to ask what the hell it was talking about) to let Santana do "any appropriate song with sufficient choral backing."   
  
Any time he thought he kind of started to understand Rachel because he understood Kurt and Kurt was like Rachel sometimes, or because they were both Jews and that was a powerful bond, the girl'd do something weird like that and he'd realize it was a really good thing she broke up with him after like ten minutes. She was more crazy than she was annoying, and that was saying a fucking lot.  
  
It was weird to see who was standing behind the curtain as the song began. Rachel and Finn back there, Kurt and Sam and Quinn and Matt not...it was just kind of  _weird_  to have things flipped like that. The atmosphere was almost eerily calm; they'd had three whole days to rework their set list and relearn choreography, but they weren't up against their number one nemesis and national champion so a lot of the nervous energy wasn't there. Almost a kind of quiet confidence set in - they could do this.  
  
Out in the audience, Kurt sat awkwardly two seats off the aisle. All the guys had clamoured to sit near him, with the logic that now that he didn't have to worry about being seen as a double agent he could give them all the dirt on his former team. He didn't anticipate doing too much of that, though with Charlie on his left he had a feeling he'd be tested. Blaine sat to his right with a kind of intrigued, curious expression - like he couldn't wait to see who had been stupid enough to not stand up for Kurt and let him go so easily.   
  
The curtain went up on New Directions "oooo"ing the background in a much more Warbler-y way than Kurt would have ever expected given his experience with them, and every head snapped suddenly back and to the left when they heard Sam beginning to sing from the back of the auditorium. ...Right, he realized, they weren't used to people doing that. He'd gotten to where he kind of expected it.  
  
It didn't take a genius to know this was the duet Rachel had refused to do with Finn. For one thing, she always got the "enter from the back of the auditorium" song. Not that he would ever tell Finn this - because he liked that his stepbrother no longer found him unbearably creepy and annoying - but Sam actually sounded better. He sounded  _really_  good, actually.  
  
 _Now I've had the time of my life  
No, I've never felt like this before  
Yes, I swear - it's the truth  
And I owe it all to you_  
  
As Quinn entered from the other side of the auditorium, every head turned to look at her; Puck tried not to look like he was staring, but he probably couldn't bluff his way out of it if someone called him on it. She looked incredible, all coy and sweet in a way that made him totally want to gag. She used to look at Finn like that and he fucking hated it, but now it didn't bother him quite as much. Maybe because he knew he had a piece of her now whether she wanted to admit it or not. Maybe because it wasn't like they were going to get together even if she broke up with Sam tomorrow because he had Kurt and didn't think even Quinn would be quite worth giving him up. Mostly...she'd had as shitty a year as he had, probably a little more because he was still a stud and she got labeled the slut by like everyone in school, and he kinda liked that she was happy. Sam wasn't his bro like Finn had been or anything, but he was cool and not nearly as oblivious, actually treated her good. He still totes had the right to kick the guy's ass if he broke Quinn's heart or anything, so that was good enough as far as he was concerned.  
  
 _Cause I've had the time of my life  
And I owe it all to you_  
  
Kurt barely managed to restrain his laughter as Sam and Quinn danced their way slowly down the aisles. Somehow Mr. Schue had managed to find the one and only dancer in the world worse than Finn; the guy really was Finn 2.0, wasn't he? Charlie's index finger drew something on the top of his thigh and Kurt looked at him as if to ask what the hell he was doing. Charlie started again - a circle, line, angle, then another one beside it. Kurt had no idea what the hell it was supposed to mean, all he could think of was "007" and he didn't think that was really appropriate for the circumstances.  
  
Charlie shook his head and gave a subtle wave of his hand as if to say 'nevermind,' then began a new pattern: a careful 6, then a 9- While Kurt had never been an especially conventional person and Puck had certainly kept him from being overly tame when it came to sex, Kurt was fairly certain that propositioning someone for mutual blowjobs in the middle of a crowded auditorium was a little much. When Charlie saw the look on Kurt's face, he almost laughed, then gave a sharp point in Sam's direction.  
  
 _Oh_ , okay. Maybe. He couldn't tell if Charlie was trying to ask if Kurt and Sam had done anything, if Sam might do anything with Charlie, or possibly just if Sam was gay using what was apparently the universal symbol for 'homo'; in any event, the answer was sadly the same. Kurt gave a tiny shake of his head and pointed discreetly first at Sam, then across the auditorium at Quinn, then back at Sam. Charlie looked disappointed and Kurt could imagine exactly why. He patted Charlie's knee knowingly and went back to watching.  
  
Sam gave a little smile in Kurt's direction as he passed on his way up to the stage, and all Kurt could think of was that he hoped Mr. Schue hadn't been stupid enough to try to choreograph the infamous lift into the number; dropping someone onstage generally killed whatever other momentum a group would have, and Sam's shoulder was already screwed up enough.  
  
With the whole group on stage so focus wasn't divided between the front and back of the house, Kurt tried valiantly to watch all his friends...but his eyes kept being drawn to Puck. He kept forgetting how much exponentially hotter the guy got when he sang - even if you couldn't hear him, the mere knowledge of what he sounded like and that he was doing  _that_  was somehow enough. Plus Puck's kind of casual confidence was out in full force, which Kurt had always found exponentially hotter than the semi-forced "I'm so badass you know you want me" act.  
  
He wasn't the only one who thought so. Charlie leaned over and hissed, "Okay, the bad boy  _sings_? I may die now." Kurt just grinned.  
  
The number went well enough - not nearly as exuberant as Rachel's Barbra the year before, nor as climactic as the moment in "Faithfully" where the curtain raised to reveal them all, but the enthusiasm when the whole group started the chorus was pretty stirring. The audience definitely seemed to be into it, including the Warblers seated around Kurt.  
  
And no one fell down or ran into each other or dropped anyone else, which shouldn't really have been a criteria but considering who a few of the dancers were...it was a valid fear to have for his friends.  
  
As the next song began and Santana took center front dance position, Kurt supposed this was the infamous trade-away solo Finn had talked about. He had no idea what song it was going to be, and even once it began he didn't really know it; it was obviously too modern to be a choice by Mr. Schue, that was for sure (Dirty Dancing, on the other hand, made perfect sense), but he couldn't guarantee he'd heard it more than maybe once sometime somewhere. One of the guys behind him mumbled something about Amy Winehouse, and he decided that would make sense - the song suited Santana's voice well, that was for sure.  
  
And the lyrics suited her even better.  
  
 _Well sometimes I go out by myself  
And I look across the water  
And I think of all the things, what you're doing,  
And in my head I paint a picture_  
  
She turned to her right, where Finn was dancing, and began to sing the chorus with a look that Kurt recognized well - a cross between a self-satisfied smile, a triumphant eyebrow raise, and her well-practiced neck-bob. It was the look that, from Santana, almost  _always_  meant, "That's right, I got your man in bed with me. Whatcha gonna do now, bitch?"   
  
Rachel looked like she might very well shove Artie's wheelchair off the stage to get past him so she could rip out Santana's hair from the roots with her bare hands. "Calm down," he mouthed to her as broadly as he could. He'd managed to see her in the auditorium during his number, stage-mothering him, telling him to smile - this was more important. No one wanted to give awards to the girl who looked like she would commit homicide onstage if given half a chance and a sharp enough instrument (or something large enough and blunt, really). Besides, she went sharp when she was angry - badly, badly sharp - and since at least a few people in the group tended to follow her line to find their own whether it was the best line to follow or not, it would throw everyone off.  
  
 _Cause since I've come on home,  
Well my body's been a mess  
And I miss your ginger hair  
And the way you like to dress  
Won't you come on over,  
Stop making a fool out of me  
Why don't you come on over, Valerie?_  
  
Finn danced back with her awkwardly - though he always danced awkwardly, so Kurt had a hard time telling if this was more or less odd-looking than usual, and he kept glancing upstage to see just how much Rachel was going to kill him and like he was trying to tell her without saying anything that he so hadn't planned this and he only wanted  _her_ and not Santana, but that wasn't easy to do even for someone who  _wasn't_  Finn. Watching it was painfully awkward.  
  
"Okay, what's the deal there?" Blaine whispered.  
  
"They had sex last year, and Rachel - the brunette who looks like she's contemplating multiple justifiable homicides - just found out this week. She gave Santana the solo to prove something, then Santana picked a solo where  _she_ could prove-"  
  
"That she got the girl's man in bed? Ouch," Blaine replied with a guilty smile, like he shouldn't be enjoying the intrigue so much but he couldn't help it.  
  
If he didn't know the people, Kurt concluded, he might find it funny too. But if Rachel broke up with Finn again, the guy would be miserable, and he really hadn't done anything wrong and he really wasn't a fan of Santana.  
  
He was even less a fan of Santana when she turned to her left after the break - to dance the second verse with Puck.  
  
 _Did you have to go to jail, put your house all up for sale  
Did you get a good lawyer?_  
  
Okay, so Puck hadn't planned Santana's song choice or anything. He hadn't even picked the choreography or who she would dance with when - she worked all that out with Mike and Brittany and just kind of presented it to all of them on Friday afternoon when no one really had time to protest or rework it without causing a giant shitstorm.   
  
Anyone in their right mind would know it was a bitchslap. Especially her dancing with Finn like that. He wasn't an idiot, he knew it was a swipe at Kurt, too...but hey, if Kurt could be all flirty like that with the curly-haired dude he talked about all the time, fair was fair, right? He was a sex shark, he wasn't about to be some tied-down jealous punk who got pissed when Kurt got cutesy with some dork but wasn't allowed to even look at someone in return. Santana was a pain in the ass but she was still smoking, and they always had killer chemistry - musically and otherwise.  
  
What was wrong with being - and he couldn't believe he was going to use a phrase Rachel came up with - vocally promiscuous?   
  
 _I hope you didn't catch a tan,  
I hope you find the right man who'll fix it for ya_  
  
Kurt couldn't ignore the sneer on the word 'man', but he was more focused on other things.  
  
Like how much he was going to fucking  _kill_  Puck when this was over.  
  
 _Now are you shopping anywhere, change the colour of your hair  
And are you busy?  
And did you have to pay that fine that you've been dodging all the time  
Are you still busy?_  
  
Puck was dancing with her. Not awkwardly or reluctantly, either - dancing like he would've last year. With plenty of eye contact and bopping back and forth in time with her in a move Kurt would always associate with the end of "Four Minutes", but  _much_  closer. And he kept throwing a smirk or an eyebrow raise in the direction of the audience, almost like he was saying "That's right, I got the smoking cheerleader right where I want her."  
  
If it was aimed at him instead of the audience writ large, Kurt was definitely going to fucking kill him..  
  
From the glare Kurt was sporting, Blaine ventured, "And I'm guessing she's not his favourite hag?"  
  
Kurt snorted at the idea of anything involving Santana and the word hag, but he hissed back, "His ex."  
  
"...Ah," Blaine nodded. They did look a little too...Callie and McSteamy. He wasn't sure who would be who in this situation, but felt like it certainly had to be apt.  
  
 _Cause since I've come on home,  
Well my body's been a mess  
And I miss your ginger hair  
And the way you like to dress  
Won't you come on over,  
Stop making a fool out of me  
Why don't you come on over, Valerie?_  
  
It took everything in Kurt not to point out under his breath that she was the one who stopped sleeping with Puck and not vice versa and she didn't get to talk about being made a fool of when she was up on stage singing a song like that with  _his fucking boyfriend_  in front of several hundred people.  
  
There was a collective jaw drop from the Warblers when she danced over to sing the next verse to Brittany.  
  
 _Well sometimes I go out by myself  
And I look across the water  
And I think of all the things, what you're doing,  
And in my head I paint a picture  
_  
"Okay, you have  _got_  to introduce me to that girl," Ethan declared from behind him.  
  
...Typical.  
  
See, if she would just keep dancing with Brittany, he wouldn't hate her so much, Kurt concluded. He could like the two of them together. She was the only person who really looked out for Britt, it was obvious they loved each other, why couldn't she just stay the hell away from guys she knew were taken? It was-  
  
Okay, technically Puck wasn't "taken", they were open, but whatever. The flaunting of it because she knew it pissed people off was so juvenile and spiteful and drove him absolutely crazy. The fact that Puck had gone with it pissed him off even more.  
  
He seethed quietly through the last chorus but perked up when he noticed Mercedes and Tina getting into prominent positions for the next number. The two of them usually ended up with about as much solo time as he did during competitions - Tina had the same verse-cut problem he did at the previous year's Regionals, Mercedes only ever got the belt-out notes at the end (though he did envy she even got that much).  
  
 _Happiness hit her like a train on a track  
Coming towards her, stuck still, no turning back_  
  
He kind of vaguely knew this one, more than the Santana solo at least, but not well enough that he'd ever really thought of the lyrics. But it sounded like his kind of song - he of all people knew how much happiness could sting when it finally happened.   
  
 _She hid around corners and she hid under beds  
She killed it with kisses and from it she fled_  
  
He had to admit, he was incredibly curious why Mercedes gave Puck a knowing look on that look, and why Puck returned it with a kind of almost smile. He was also curious why it seemed like Tina was searching for something - kind of peering out into the audience. Maybe her parents were here, but he didn't think she cared  _that_  much, and Mr. Schue was almost certainly off to the side of the stage, so he wasn't sure what exactly she was trying to find.   
  
 _Run fast for your mother, run fast for your father  
Run for your children, for your sisters and your brothers  
Leave all your loving, your loving behind  
You can't carry it with you if you wanna survive_  
  
The audience picked up when the song did - they were definitely feeling it. It was a great number, Kurt had to admit, with a lot better dancing than he expected. They looked jubilant, like they finally hit their stride, but at the same time there were these weird awkward moments and gestures. It started with Sam, then Tina and Puck and Quinn, then Mercedes and Rachel and Artie, then Finn-...a kind of weird head move in his general direction that never fit with the rest of the choreography but seemed to be something they were all getting from each other.  
  
 _The dog days are over  
The dog days are done  
Can you hear the horses  
Cause here they come_  
  
Tina looked right at him as the verse got quiet and all stripped down and simple. His eyes widened as she sang.  
  
 _And I never wanted anything for you  
Except everything you had and what was left after that too_  
  
Oh god.  
  
Suddenly he got it. A song about happiness hitting suddenly and trying to keep up with it, running and never looking back to survive in spite of everything dark that's happened-  
  
This was the sing-off he'd never gotten when he left.  
  
 _Happiness hit her like a bullet in the back  
Struck from a great height by someone who should know better than that_  
  
Mercedes belted it towards him with a kind of regretful look like she was the person who should have known better, and he wanted to hug her. He put his hand over his heart in silent acknowledgment and moved gratitude, and though it seemed like it took her a second to see it, when she did she started beaming and mirrored the gesture as she sang.  
  
He wasn't going to cry, except maybe he was a little bit. The sight of the whole team - okay, everyone but Lauren and Santana - looking right at him and singing enthusiastically and dancing and telling him to be free and go be exactly who he should be at Dalton with their blessing...his grip on the armrest tightened and he beamed despite his watery eyes.  
  
They had the entire audience clapping in syncopated rhythm with them now, everyone kind of dancing in their seats, and even though the harmonies themselves weren't complicated the number of different parts and melodies going on at once did make it a slightly more complicated than usual song. More importantly, they sounded  _amazing_  and had such a fierce, undeniable energy.  
  
 _Run fast for your mother, run fast for your father  
Run for your children, for your sisters and your brothers  
Leave all your loving, your loving behind  
You can't carry it with you if you wanna survive_  
  
New Directions was going to win this, Kurt realized, and they would absolutely deserve it. With a number like this, the dancing Brittany and Mike were doing, the way Mercedes was hitting those notes, the show face they were all giving...he would not feel bad for half a second about losing to them when they sounded this good. Some competitions really did come down to who was more 'on' on a particular day, and today...  
 _  
The dog days are over  
The dog days are done  
Can you hear the horses  
Cause here they come_  
  
The crowd went wild as the last notes died away, and from the looks on their faces...they knew they'd killed it. Sometimes you just knew; he'd known during Nationals before he was done with minute 12.   
  
Now all that was left was to see if the judges agreed with what everyone in that room already knew.  
  
* * * * *  
  
The judging always lasted forever, but the five minutes onstage waiting for the results to be announced somehow managed to feel longer than the previous hour - and that hour always felt like at least six.  
  
New Directions stood in the center, Mr. Schue right up there with the team like always, with the Hipsters to their left side and the Warblers to their right. Kurt had seriously contemplated being as far away from his former team as he could for this part, but then Puck was standing to the far right edge of the team and he kind of ended up over there without consciously meaning to. Puck's hand reached down and laced through his while he stared straight ahead and Kurt stared off to the far right side of the auditorium.  
  
He couldn't see their joyous faces if he lost, he'd need a minute. And if he won...then he  _really_  couldn't see them.  
  
"In third place..."  
  
He tried to remember if they'd announced third first at last year's Sectionals. He remembered Regionals, obviously, but he could have sworn they did it this was in the prior competition. Maybe. In either event, it kept him on-edge for an extra few minutes because the Hipsters' third-place finish, as announced by Rod Remington (did the guy have no other job than this? Obviously he was a news anchor, but did he seriously just go judge competitions every weekend or something?) just meant that it was now seriously down to the Warblers and New Directions for first and second. He wondered if his father's heart problems were more genetic than lifestyle-based because he certainly felt like he'd always imagined a heart attack would feel like; he couldn't breathe, the entire room was spinning, he was dizzy and-  
  
"New Directions!"  
  
His head snapped up, ready to congratulate his friends, only to realize that had been the award for second. Blaine's first was in the air in victory and the Warblers were cheering and jumping like a group of excitable puppies instead of like the normally-well-coiffed guys he was used to. He heard a whistle from the back of the auditorium that he could almost guarantee had come from his dad. He felt Puck squeeze his hand, then release as he was swept into a group hug of sweaty poly-blend blazers.  
  
He ducked quickly out of the throng of hugging, cheering boys without a word; he'd gotten good at slipping out of situations unnoticed back when he still went to McKinley. Mercedes jokingly called him a ninja more than a couple times for the way he could bypass a group of dancing students and sneak into a corner somewhere to check his phone instead. It was a gift, what could he say?  
  
He slipped out to the lobby, hoping to say a quick hello to his dad and Carole before Finn came out. He didn't want it to be like that. He didn't want to see any of his old friends yet...not because they wouldn't be happy for him - he knew they would be. Or at least they would try to be. But their dreams had just been crushed, their season was  _over_  now, and they had nothing to work towards until  _next year_. They had the right to be devastated and pissed off for awhile before he swooped in and they had to pretend they didn't mind that his win had cost them. He remembered what losing to Vocal Adrenaline had felt like, and he didn't...he couldn't imagine trying to be happy for someone in that moment, even if that someone had been Mercedes or someone he liked far more than Jesse.  
  
He found his family (sans Finn) pretty easily; his dad's bright red OSU baseball cap stood out pretty well even in the sea of people. He'd joked a few weeks earlier about their parents wearing red as a compromise so they could root for both sons, and he wasn't entirely surprised they'd actually done it. His dad still wasn't used to how this whole show choir thing worked, he was used to football games where there was tailgating and showing up in school or team colours - whether or not they were good for a particular skintone - for the big championship.   
  
It was sweet in a way that only made sense because Kurt knew his father as well as he did. From anyone else he would have found it kind of strange...but he couldn't help but notice how few other parents came to this, which kind of surprised him. Especially the Warblers, whom he doubted had parents who got stuck with weekend or night shifts. Puck's mom not being able to switch her work schedule, Carole almost not being able to make it - all that made sense to him. But where were Blaine's parents, or Charlie's, at 2:00 on a Saturday afternoon? A golf game or something? It was November.  
  
"Hey!" Burt called proudly. "There's my boy. You did good up there, kid."  
  
"Thank you," Kurt replied politely. When his dad's smile faltered at the lack of reciprocation, he forced the best grin he could but kept his eyes scanning for any sign of Finn. His stepbrother shouldn't have to stand around and watch his accomplishments be gushed over like that - Kurt remembered  _really_  well what that one felt like and wouldn't have wished that on his worst enemy.   
  
"You sounded really great," Carole said with a genuine smile as she hugged him. He was slowly getting used to having a more literally-hands-on parent around. It was kind of strange after not having that for more than a decade.  
  
"Listen, dinner anywhere you want tonight. To celebrate," Burt said, eyes shining.   
  
"Thank you, but I still have to take the bus back, get my car from Blaine's, come home...by the time I get there I think I'll just want to crash for awhile. It was an early morning," he offered stiffly. "Sometime this week," he added when his dad looked kind of disappointed. "I have to go; I don't want the bus to leave without me." He gave each parent a quick hug in turn, then dashed backstage to where the Warblers were snapping pictures of each other with the trophy on their iPhones.  
  
"Can you believe it?" Blaine gushed, grinning, as Kurt returned.  
  
"No," Kurt replied honestly with the same fake smile he'd been plastering on for a good ten minutes now. It was starting to hurt his cheeks.  
  
"Last year we came in third here. This feels  _so_  much better!"  
  
Kurt wished it did. He knew winning felt better than losing, obviously, but all he could think of was the long, quiet, agonizing bus ride his friends were going to have back to McKinley. He remembered the ride back from Regionals with everyone silent, listening to their respective depressing playlists - more than a few versions of Hallelujah, if he recalled correctly, and Artie's Tupac, and lots of sad, soulful Celine and Mariah and Whitney on his own. Coming in second when they'd won the previous year couldn't feel good on its own, let alone with all the dashed hopes and dreams.  
  
They were ushered out to the Dalton Academy bus, where the party atmosphere continued with plenty of loud singing that Kurt would've sworn sounded drunk if he didn't know the guys better. More like overly-jubilant, he guessed. But even when the guys started an impromptu version of Bad Romance, he couldn't manage to feel happy about any of it.  
  
"What's up?" Blaine asked, sliding into the seat beside Kurt without warning.  
  
"Nothing," Kurt replied simply.   
  
"We won and you look like someone died. Did one of your friends say something?"  
  
"No," he said honestly. "I didn't see any of them yet, but they'd be happy for me." That was the problem. "Have you ever been to New York?" he asked, and Blaine stared at him like the question had come out of nowhere. Kurt supposed it had, to anyone who wasn't in his head - or in New Directions.  
  
"Yeah, couple times," Blaine replied with a shrug - a  _shrug_ , like it was no big deal!   
  
...To him it wasn't, Kurt realized suddenly. The size of the guy's house, how much his parents paid for his tuition? New York wasn't a pipe dream to him, it was a real and tangible place. It was somewhere he'd  _been_ , and not just once either. "A couple times"? Kurt couldn't imagine ever being that casual about the place he'd been dreaming about going since he was 6 and found out what the "Broadway" in "Give my Regards to Broadway" referred to.   
  
"I haven't," he offered quietly. "That's where Nationals are this year, you know?"  
  
Blaine grinned. "One step at a time, Kurt. Next we'll probably be up against Vocal Adrenaline who  _crushed_  us last year."  
  
"Us too," Kurt replied with a very faint smile at the commonality. A metaphorical warning bell went off at the back of his mind - if Vocal Adrenaline won their Sectional competition in...one week? Two? He couldn't remember for sure, but it was coming up still before the holidays - anyway, if they won, then it would be both of Goolsby's teams against each other, and he had told Puck he'd speak up if that happened. He still intended to; he just had no idea  _how_. He pushed the thought aside - he'd deal with it in a couple weeks, if the second condition was fulfilled. "Anyway. It was a thing- in New Directions, we had gotten in our heads that Nationals was our goal. Nevermind that we lost at Regionals last year, and pretty badly. But that was what we talked about, planned for...none of us had ever been to New York. I only know one person from my town who has. I don't think I know anyone who has a passport except kids who've gone to Canada and one girl whose parents took her on one of those ridiculous Disney cruises when she was 10. Most of the people in my old school have never seen the ocean, so getting to go to New York was...it was big."  
  
"Then I guess we better start working - get you to the Big Apple," Blaine smiled, and Kurt returned it faintly, but Blaine didn't  _get_  it. Going to New York with these guys - while he suspected would be much more fun and way more gay-friendly than going with New Directions - wasn't the same. Blaine probably wasn't the only one who'd been there before. Some of the guys had even been to Europe, he knew from a conversation during his French class, and there was something about the idea of all of them getting to experience New York  _for the first time_  together...  
  
He had a feeling he would spend the entire time wishing Mercedes was standing next to him. They'd only been talking about all the fabulous things they would do there for practically the entire time they'd known each other. And Rachel would play horrible tourguide thanks to her obsessive mind for Broadway trivia, and Finn would get lost on the numbered crosstown streets...and they'd sneak off to fabulous piano bars and sip Shirley Temples while they took over the entire Broadway collection and looked at cute choir boys who were ten years too old for them.  
  
Now he'd be going without them if he got to go at all. It made the whole thing feel so much emptier.  
  
* * * * *  
The Hipsters were easy to find after the competition, and not just because they were a team of octogenarians in brightly-coloured vests and ties. The cluster of them in the lobby seemed genuinely happy to have even competed. As Will approached, he heard one man talking about how his grandkids talked about wanting to join their school's choir after today; they were all smiles.  
  
"Hey," he said awkwardly, as he realized he was interrupting. "I just wanted to say you guys were really great today."  
  
"Thank you. Those kids you coach sounded really great," one of them said.  
  
"I used to dance like that blonde girl when I was her age. Back then my mother would have given  _anything_  for me not to," a woman told him conspiratorily with a big grin.  
  
"I actually need to speak with your director for a minute if you're not rushing out - I know Warren's a long drive," he offered.  
  
"I got a minute," Wayne said, moving to the fore of the group. "Whatcha need?"  
  
"Can we talk privately?" he asked, glancing at the Hipsters.  
  
"Sure, son." Wayne led him into the now-empty auditorium. "What's going on?"  
  
"I think there's been cheating," Will stated bluntly.  
  
"Now, if you're talking to me, and not the judges, you must think it was those boys in the uniforms," Wayne said slowly.  
  
"Yes."  
  
"What makes you think that?"  
  
"Their director is also the coach of Vocal Adrenaline."  
  
"Those kids who win the national title every year."  
  
"Exactly."  
  
Wayne thought about it for a minute. "Any rules against that?"  
  
"Not specifically, but there are conduct regulations against appearances of impropriety, integrity...I want to go to the judges with what I know, and I'd like you to join me."  
  
Wayne waved his hand and shook his head. "Young man, my team did not get where they are in life by taking the easy road and blaming everyone around them for whatever happens unfairly. They're doing something really brave and hard doing all this - school's hard enough when you get to be my age, but singing and dancing and getting in front of people who think anyone who doesn't do high school right the first time around must be stupid or a delinquent? I got three guys in my choir who got Purple Hearts before they turned 18 'cause they forged their birth certificates to fight a war. That sound like the kind of people who go around making allegations about cheating without some damn hard evidence?"  
  
"No," Will replied quietly, "But I know this coach. He's broken other rules this season that I can prove. And I have a feeling there's more going on than just moonlighting at two different schools two hours apart."  
  
Wayne drew in a slow breath and let it out in a sigh. "I dunno, kid. I can't say something until I know more. But you do whatcha gotta do - go with your gut." He patted Will's shoulder and walked back towards the lobby. "And tell those kids of yours not to be so glum about it - the wrinkles come fast enough without them helping it along."  
  
Will stood alone in the room, his fingers tightening around the rulebook.  _Go with my gut,_  he mused silently. With a deep breath, he went in search of the judges - or at least someone with whom he could lodge a formal complaint.


	6. Chapter 6

"What the hell is this?" Puck asked, quirking an eyebrow.  
  
"Season 5." Kurt slid a little closer to him. They sat near the center, taking up most but not quite all of the sofa; Puck slouched, legs splayed wide, while Kurt was draped lithely across his half of the couch, legs over Puck's thigh.  
  
"Of?"  
  
"Grey's Anatomy," Kurt replied. He reached off the side of the couch to hold up the DVD case. When Puck didn't look impressed, Kurt said, "I was trying to find something neutral we could both handle."  
  
Puck snorted and grabbed a coke from the end table. "It's a bunch of girls talking about the guys they're fucking."  
  
"The hot doctor guys they're fucking," Kurt corrected.  
  
It was Puck's own fault, Kurt maintained. The guy texted at noon on a Sunday and said he was stuck keeping an eye on Sarah and a couple of her classmates all afternoon, and did Kurt want to come over and hang out with actual clothes on? Kurt had brought his DVD collection if only because he knew there was virtually no chance he could otherwise get through the afternoon without Puck trying to force him to play some video game that came out before they were born.   
  
He'd seen Puck's DVD collection before. He wasn't sure why his boyfriend had such a penchant for cartoons aimed at the surly frat boy set, but he wasn't about to take his chances on being stuck watching South Park all day again.  
  
"You're not s'posed to say that," one of Sarah's little friends called from where they sat at the kitchen table working on some kind of diorama project. Kurt swore it was just the long straight brown hair that made him think of Rachel...except, no, she was definitely the take-charge kid. He remembered Rachel at that age, and group projects with Rachel at that age, and that girl would definitely grow up to usurp solos and wear hideous sweaters.  
  
"Noah always says it," Sarah replied like that explained everything and a look that Kurt swore said 'are you questioning my brother's badassness?'  
  
"Good to see you didn't rub off on her at all," Kurt teased Puck quietly, who just smiled and gave a little shrug.  
  
"You have to go at some point?" Puck asked.  
  
Kurt shrugged. "At some point. My father's none too pleased that I've been avoiding him and Carole so they can properly proclaim my victory with a dinner I can guarantee my dad shouldn't be eating."  
  
"Finn being that much of a wuss about it?"  
  
"Not really. He hasn't said anything. No one has." In truth he'd been avoiding them. Quinn and Mercedes had each sent congratulatory texts from the bus, but other than a quick call with Sam he hadn't been able to get out - damn him for picking up the phone without checking the ID first - he'd kept his responses minimal. It felt too much like he was rubbing their noses in it.  
  
"You know we're cool with it, right?" Puck asked. There were times he really didn't get the guy. Kurt had gone somewhere to be happy and stop looking so damn miserable all the time, he was at the new school now but still got all fucking weird around people from McKinley. He won and wasn't happy about it - and didn't want anyone else to be happy either. What was the point of winning if you were just gonna bitch about it? It was like a fucking waste.  
  
He should ask Sam about it. Maybe it was a weird transfer-kid thing like that. Ask Sam if he'd be pissed if McKinley beat his old school in football playoffs or something. Shit - he hoped that wasn't a possibility. Even though he wasn't really used to the fact that the team was good now, they were - they were still playing in November, and that wasn't something he'd ever done before because the regular season always ended right around Halloween so playoffs could be done by Christmas. But he really didn't want to have to deal with the only two guys he talked to on a regular basis both whining about winning shit. At that point he'd lock them in a room and let them bore each other or something.  
  
"I know." Kurt picked at a loose thread on the chintz fabric arm of the couch. "Any word from Figgins about what happens now?" he asked quietly.  
  
Puck shrugged. "He's gone."  
  
Kurt looked up suddenly. "What?"  
  
"Yeah. Does Finn, like, never talk to you or something?"  
  
"What happened?"  
  
"He was out with the flu, and Ms. Sylvester took over. Like a coup or something - it was kinda awesome. Except when she tried to disband football, but Coach Beiste pointed out the Cheerios wouldn't have shit to do without us."  
  
"Is Figgins coming back?"  
  
Puck shrugged. "I don't think so. Something about impressing the school board with healthy food or whatever. Mercedes was pissed at her and no one else gave a fuck."  
  
Kurt blinked. "Then how did glee club still exist? She's been trying to destroy it since the beginning, as principal wouldn't she-"  
  
"I dunno. Mr. Schue's still there, group's still there." He shrugged as if to punctuate his statement with 'what else do I care?' To be honest, he didn't really care as long as she didn't get rid of football. Or basketball, he guessed, or baseball since it was the one sport where he could totally outshine Finn. Height didn't help the guy there, and Puck was fast with killer guns. He owned that shit. Ms. Sylvester was kind of a bitch, but at least she didn't try and talk to him like he was stupid the way Figgins did. She wasn't an idiot, either - which sucked for him because Figgins or Ms. Pillsbury would totally buy his 'I'm so sorry and sad and won't do it again' act sometimes, but when she wasn't cheating she was fair about stuff.  
  
Still meant the club might be disbanded for the next year, though. She'd tried to get them shut down enough times before and no way would she listen to Mr. Schue if he tried to plead for another year.   
  
After a few minutes of comfortable silence and Puck looking vaguely annoyed, Kurt declared, "I know what I did wrong with this."  
  
"Huh?"  
  
"Not season 5," he declared. He reached down to flip through the DVD wallet and pulled out another disc. "Season 2."  
  
"Don't-"  
  
"This episode has two things going for it: First, a bomb in a body cavity."  
  
"A what?"  
  
"Unexploded grenade in a guy's chest."  
  
"Okay, that's kinda sweet. Like a James Bond villain or something."  
  
"Yes. And second...three girls naked in the shower."  
  
Puck's eyebrows raised. "Why didn't you put that one in first then?" he asked.   
  
Mission accomplished. Kurt grinned and started to get up to put in the next disc. He pulled his phone from his pocket when it chirped and opened the new message from Mercedes.  
  
 _omg bb u ok?_  
  
What the hell? He typed back,  _Why wouldn't I be?_  and pressed 'send', then changed DVDs and sat back down - much closer to being on Puck's lap this time. Puck quirked an eyebrow but certainly didn't look like he was going to complain.   
  
The message from Mercedes just read  _facebook_ , so Kurt opened it and began to scroll through trying desperately to figure out what had his best friend so worried about him. Was someone from McKinley saying he was dead again? Because the rumour about him being crushed by a giant shipment of fruit being delivered to a local grocery store had been vaguely entertaining and gotten points for creativity - as well as for its use of a slur without being obvious about it - but the excess of weepy "omg I loved him!" posts from girls he had never heard of had just gotten tiring after awhile. Maybe someone was threatening him, like the time Karofsky (it was under the name 'Penn S. McAssface' but the excess of comments from Azimio gave Kurt a decent suspicion as to the true administrator) had started the 'Crush a Hummel Day' event complete with pictures of shattered ceramic figurines. He could find them all vaguely amusing now that he was safely away from all of them and only had to deal with them via electronic idiocy, so whatever this was couldn't be too bad.  
  
The post in question came from Rachel originally, which surprised him only until he read its contents. She had shared a link to a press release on the Ohio Show Choir Committee's website, and knowing Rachel it had probably taken every ounce of self control she had to not post a comment with it.   
  
The title of the link said plenty: "Results in Central Ohio Sectional Held Pending Investigation."  
  
Okay, it said a lot but it didn't actually  _tell_  him anything - nor did the comments, which mostly consisted of people asking WTF and Artie saying "That b jacked up yo!" and a lengthy colloquy between Rachel and Quinn about how precisely she found the information. It shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone that Rachel stalked the OSCC website to try to plan strategically for next year and/or find another school to transfer to where she could better unleash her full potential and compete with them in Regionals (and beyond, she claimed).  
  
"What?" Puck asked as Kurt began to quickly scroll through his phone with a confused and irritated expression.  
  
"There's an investigation into the results from yesterday."  
  
Puck sighed. "What'd Berry do?"  
  
Kurt shook his head, still reading. The press release said very little, just that there had been allegations of cheating by the Dalton Academy Warblers and the results would not be finalized until a formal inquiry could be completed. "Who would say this?" Kurt demanded angrily. "Cheated- How in the world did we cheat? We got up there, we sang our entire set a capella which is more than I can say for either of the other two groups, we had the most points, we won. What else is there than that?"  
  
No, he hadn't been particularly happy about winning, and he fully recognized other things were more important. But crying foul to try to win a competition that a team had  _lost_  because they were bitter was a cheap shot and just plain unfair - not to mention ridiculous. Absent some evidence that the Warblers had fewer points than New Directions but got the win because of one of the guys' rich parents, in what universe had anyone done anything wrong that would warrant this?   
  
And, more importantly, who would say shit like that?  
  
* * * * *  
  
The confusion and reaction that had been best summed up as "What the fuck?" on Sunday at 1 had reached frustration by Monday at 8 and out-right indignance by Monday at 3.  
  
"How could they do this?" Tina demanded.  
  
"Do what?" Brittany asked. There was a lot of the usual eye-rolling, but Santana butt in.  
  
"No, really. What did they actually  _do_? We just know they cheated."  
  
"We know someone  _said_  they cheated," Puck replied, arms crossed.   
  
"We know-"  
  
"We know shit," he stated firmly. That had been Kurt's biggest frustration the previous afternoon; nothing would tell him what the allegations were. What he and his team were even being accused of.  
  
Everyone looked at Rachel expectantly. It took her a few minutes to notice, but when she did, she asked, "What?"  
  
"You're the one who went sniffing around this - what'd you find?" Artie asked.  
  
"More like why'd you go looking?" Sam asked.  
  
"You guys, we should have won," Rachel stated earnestly. "Our vocals were superior, we had more energy, more- more enthusiasm, we were a much better team than they were. I could handle losing to Vocal Adrenaline last year because they were extraordinary-"  
  
"You didn't think so at the time," Mercedes pointed out.  
  
"They were a giant wall of sound with intricate choreography. The Warblers were-"  
  
"A capella, that takes a lot of talent," Quinn stated.  
  
"Was it you?" Puck demanded, and Finn looked between the two of them like he couldn't figure out if he was meant to jump in and defend Rachel or if he was required to stick up for his stepbrother without question.  
  
"Excuse me?"  
  
"Were you the one who filed it?" Puck asked, leaning towards her, eyes narrowed.  
  
"No," she stated emphatically. Mr. Schue walked in and she leaped to her feet. "Mr. Schue, I would like to make  _very_ clear that I was  _not_  the one who filed the complaint."  
  
"I know," Will replied, then drew in a deep breath and stated, "I was."  
  
* * * * *  
  
Unlike New Directions, the Warblers knew exactly what the allegations were; they received a charge sheet first thing Monday morning informing them that a formal committee was being convened to investigate their coach's misconduct. The knowledge did nothing to curb their anger - it only fueled it further.  
  
"They're kidding - right? They have to be kidding," David stated as he read the single sheet of paper for the tenth time.  
  
"How fucking dare they?" Ethan asked, and while the crudeness of his question earned glares from a couple of the more snobbish 'posher-than-thou' Warblers, they all shared the sentiment. "We won fair and square. Eight part harmony plus percussives? Neither of the other schools had more than four."  
  
"McKinley tends to five plus solos," Kurt replied dully, fingers against his temple.   
  
Lynn eyed him suspiciously. The senior had never been particularly fond of him and had made more than a few previous digs in his direction - always passive-aggressive, very Emily Gilmore about it all, but Kurt had been around enough people expressing enough different kinds of displeasure with him that he'd gotten pretty good at picking up on it when it was there. "What do you know about all this?" he asked, plucking the letter from David's hands and holding it in Kurt's direction.  
  
"I know exactly what you know," Kurt stated. "One of my old teammates posted the press release from the Ohio Show Choir Committee's website stating there was an investigation, then today we got this."  
  
"So which one of your 'teammates' did it?" Lynn asked.  
  
"How do you know it was one of them?"  
  
"Who else would it be? One of the senior citizens cried foul on us?" Wes pointed out.  
  
"How do we know it wasn't you?"  
  
At Lynn's direct question, Kurt sputtered in surprise and looked around for help, for justification - if he said no, it wasn't like Lynn was going to believe him or lay off anyway, not without help. The guy had never liked or trusted him, it was going to take a lot more than his assertions under direct examination to change Lynn's mind.  
  
"Because he's not a snake," Charlie stated.  
  
"We met him when he came to spy on us," Lynn pointed out sharply.  
  
"Badly," David pointed out, and Wes nodded.   
  
"Yeah, if he was playing double-agent now we'd know - no offense, Kurt."  
  
Lynn's eyes were still trained on him in a sharp, distrustful look, and Kurt wanted to say something, but he just kept looking at Blaine who was staring into space, saying nothing.  
  
Did Blaine honestly believe-  
  
"I didn't make any complaints. We didn't cheat," Kurt stated evenly. Lynn still didn't look convinced, but he did fall silent.  
  
Why wouldn't Blaine look at him? Blaine had  _gotten_  him here, he  _had_  to trust him or he wouldn't have gone to all the trouble he did - the audition, the scholarship, helping get him out of McKinley once and for all. But what else would account for the sudden cold shoulder?   
  
"Y'know what pisses me off?" Ethan asked finally as he took the letter from Lynn's hands and scanned it. "It's not like the guy even  _coached_  us. The board picks all the songs and Blaine's the one who actually directed anything. The songs, choreography...Goolsby showed up every couple weeks to yell at us then leave again, I don't think he even knows any of our names or what parts we sing. We would've been better off without him."  
  
* * * * *  
  
It had been more than eight years since the last serious allegation of cheating in Ohio. There were a few complaints every year, of course, but almost all of them were dismissed almost immediately as simple sour grapes grievances. The rest were minor infractions, things like not properly crediting an artist or arranger of a song or use of a pyrotechnic not approved for high school competition - the type of thing that invoked a monetary fine or damage payment, a slap on the wrist, but nothing too serious. On a very rare occasion there was something more serious - a school showed up with too few students and tried to fight their disqualification - but by and large it was nothing that required an investigation. Not like the Colorado decongestant ring a few years back, or the betting pool that had struck TSCA, where not only did they violate show choir competition rules but several state laws as well because Tennesse prohibited gambling of any kind within the state.   
  
Will sat nervously on a bench outside the conference room that the Committee had borrowed from the Ohio Dental Board for the week. He rolled the packet of papers into a tight tube in his hands and tried to keep from tapping his foot. He knew he was right, he absolutely stood by the complaint he'd made about Goolsby, but if they did something like open with "So what rule exactly do you think he's violated?", Will wasn't entirely sure he'd have a good answer for them. There were a number of things he thought the guy had done wrong, a variety of rules that seemed to suggest he wasn't acting in the spirit of what the Committee envisioned, but he still couldn't point to exactly what was wrong about it. He didn't have a smoking gun.  
  
The pictures of happy dentists and bright smiles around him weren't helping things, either. He didn't need to be distracted thinking about Emma and her... _Carl_  at a time like this.  
  
A petite woman with curly white hair stuck her head out of the door. "Mr. Schuester? They're ready for you now."  
  
"Thank you," he replied. He stood and smoothed his tie, then strode into the room. The five-member investigation committee was seated around the head of the oblong table - three women and two men, all in their fifties except the Asian woman who looked closer to his age. A pitcher of water and an empty glass sat near the foot of the table, and what certainly looked like a court reporter sat to the left of what looked like it was meant to be his seat. He slid into the chair next to the pitcher.  
  
"Mr. Schuester, thank you for speaking with us today," the woman in the center said. "I know Lima's a few hours from here and you have teaching responsibilities, but we appreciate your availability on this serious allegation."  
  
"Thank you for having me," he replied, then wondered if that was awkward. The court reporter adjusted a small microphone closer to him and he wondered if he should lean in and speak into it when he answered the next question.  
  
"As you can see, we have a transcriptionist here - it makes things easier on us, not having to take our own notes and compare later. This isn't a court of law, you won't be sworn in, but we still ask that you tell the whole truth to all questions asked today, do you understand?"  
  
"Yes, ma'am." He leaned in to the microphone and the - okay, transcriptionist, apparently - shook her head slightly, which he took as a sign he shouldn't do it anymore.  
  
"Good. Let's begin then. Mr. Schuester, as you well know, this matter was brought to our attention after you made allegations on Saturday regarding the coach of the Dalton Academy Warblers. Can you tell us how you came to know the information you provided?"  
  
"I saw him at the competition on Saturday - I was standing in line at the concession stand and he was nearby. I noticed he had a Dalton Academy pin, which I thought was strange because he's the coach of Vocal Adrenaline. I wondered if the Dalton coach might notice he was wearing one of their crests, then saw in the program that he was the coach of the Warblers." He'd practiced that answer a half-dozen times or so since the call had come on Monday morning that he would need to come do this interview. That was an easy one.  
  
"Now, he's new to both these teams, right?" one of the men asked, thumbing through the packet of information each one had in front of them.  
  
"I don't know how long he's been at Dalton, I know he's new to Vocal Adrenaline this year."  
  
"He replaced Shelby...what was her name?"  
  
"Corcoran."  
  
"Right, her. The one who looked like she should be in 'Wicked.' He replaced her in the fall."  
  
"Yes, sir."  
  
"So how'd you know he coached them? They weren't at the Sectionals with your group - they haven't competed yet, and from the notes I have they didn't do an invitational this fall."  
  
"Early in the school year, he stole a McKinley student."  
  
The Asian woman looked at him skeptically. "Stole?"  
  
"I should, um-" Will looked towards the transcriptionist. "I should rephrase that. 'Stole' might not be the right-"  
  
"Mr. Schuester, this isn't a courtroom, you don't need to worry about the conclusions. Just explain what you meant."  
  
Will nodded and did his best to relax. "Her name is Sunshine Corazon, she was a foreign exchange student who started attending McKinley in September. I was trying to get her to join our club - she had an amazing voice. She auditioned, but when I went to give her our rehearsal schedule, Goolsby was helping her clean out her locker. He introduced himself as her coach and said she would be on Vocal Adrenaline now. She said he had gotten her a condo and a greencard for her mother."  
  
All five of the committee members were frowning now, making their own notes. "Do you know how he found her? Your school's pretty far from Carmel, isn't it?"  
  
"About an hour," Will replied. "He was tipped off by Sue Sylvester our,-...well, our then-Cheerleading coach who has since become the principal. She told me she called him." He was glad when they didn't ask him why the cheerleading coach would call a rival choir director and tell him to poach a star; that answer would take days all on its own.   
  
"Did he do this to any other students?"  
  
The word 'no' wanted to come out, but he wasn't so sure. He couldn't get Rachel's words out of his head - "After they conveniently landed Kurt just a month before the competition." The departure had been so sudden, with no warning whatsoever, but using the justification of bullying when the bullying had been going on for years without any other threats of leaving. And he knew Kurt wanted everyone to think his family had money - with the way he dressed and the big fancy car and everything - but he knew Kurt's dad had some kind of job involving a name-shirt and there was no way he earned the kind of money necessary to send Kurt as expensive as Dalton Academy had to be. He hadn't looked up tuition rates or anything, but he seriously doubted Burt Hummel secretly had that amount of savings squirreled away for anything other than getting Kurt into a college away from Ohio.   
  
For that matter...it all happened right after Kurt started badly acting out, seeming so much more pressured and stressed than he ever had before. Maybe it was the weight of the decision - he wouldn't have put it past Kurt to negotiate for a better deal, to be honest. The kid could be...conniving was the wrong word, it made it sound so much more devious, but he wasn't afraid to ask for what he wanted whether or not it was a good idea. The way he seemed so stressed for a couple weeks, then just up and announced his departure one day, obviously without telling even Mercedes first judging by their reactions...it made sense, kind of. It made more sense than anything else.  
  
It made even more sense than that when it occurred to him that, of all the people at that school with influence over Kurt, Sue Sylvester was at the top of the list. Between roping him into filing a grievance with the school board over the lesson about spirituality-themed songs and commandeering him for the Cheerios numbers, Sue had always been able to get Kurt exactly where she wanted him no matter how he felt or what Kurt wanted.   
  
"Maybe," Will said finally. "I can't prove it - I don't know for sure, not the way I do about Sunshine. But I believe he did this to at least one more student on my team. The student had been part of New Directions since I resurrected the club last year, then he transferred about a month ago with virtually no warning to attend Dalton Academy."  
  
"Who is this student?"  
  
"Kurt Hummel."


	7. Chapter 7

Ohio Show Choir Committee  
Inspiring Students through Song since 1981  
\---------------------------------------------------------

Report of Investigation  
December 9, 2010

  
  
Re: Dustin Goolsby, Complaint [#00019](https://www.livejournal.com/rsearch/?tags=%2300019)  
  
 **Executive Summary**  
  
On December 4, 2010, Ohio Show Choir Committee North-Central Sectional Competition A was held in East Liberty. Based on judge's rankings alone, the Greater Mahoning Continuing Education Center ("Hipsters") placed third (3-3-2); William McKinley High School ("New Directions") placed second (2-1-3); Dalton Academy ("Warblers") placed first (1-2-1). Approximately 30 minutes after the presentation of awards, an individual brought allegations of misconduct by the Warblers - and, more specifically, by the Warblers' coach, Mr. Dustin Goolsby - to the attention of Annette Restman, the OSCC representative on-site to monitor the competition. Based on this individual's concerns there was insufficient evidence to trigger immediate disqualification; however, due to the seriousness of the allegations and the highly irregular nature of Mr. Goolsby's purported conduct, an investigative committee was convened on Monday, December 6, 2010, to determine:  
  
1\. what, if any, truth was behind the allegations made to Ms. Restman;  
2\. if the allegations were indeed true, what if any OSCA rules or conduct standards were violated by Mr. Goolsby; and  
3\. whether any additional OSCA rules or conduct standards were violated by Mr. Goolsby in addition to those previous alleged.  
  
The investigative committee interviewed eight witnesses over the course of three days (Transcripts attached). Based on these interviews, as well as based on a thorough review of financial documents, Mr. Goolsby's contracts, and additional documents voluntarily provided to the committee by the witnesses, the Ohio Show Choir Committee hereby makes the following findings:  
  
Simultaneous Coaching  
  
The primary allegation leveled against Mr. Goolsby was improper "dual-coaching" as he is listed as the coach of the Warblers and the director of Carmel Senior High School's Vocal Adrenaline. It is important to note that no OSCC rule prohibits an individual from serving concurrently as the coach of more than one team, even if those teams are slated to compete against one another or could compete against one another in a future competition. In this way, Mr. Goolsby has committed no violation.   
  
However, Mr. Goolsby's conduct - once called into question - led us to examine additional records and communications maintained by the respective schools to determine whether any derivative fraud or misconduct had occurred that might trigger either a specific violation of OSCC rules or the more general provision 11.7.3 which prohibits coaches from acting in a way to bring about the appearance of impropriety or reflect poorly upon OSCC or its national counterpart (NASC, Inc.).   
  
Based on interviews with Dalton Academy Arts Administrator, Mr. Jose Mendez, and the president of the Vocal Adrenaline Boosters, Ms. Eleanor Hardaway-Grimm, the committee found substantial evidence that Mr. Goolsby had been engaging both schools in fierce negotiations regarding his "win bonus." While a coach or director who is not a school employee but rather contracted by the school for the purpose of advising the choir may often request - and receive - an additional fee based on the number of wins achieved by the choir he or she has supervised, Mr. Goolsby failed to secure this contract term prior to beginning his tenure at each school. Instead, it appears that he was attempting to ratchet up his bonus at each school, in particular with regard to his fee should each team win at Regionals. Due to the location of these two schools, the likelihood of a head-to-head competition at the Western Ohio Regional Competition in the spring is substantial. Several witnesses expressed a belief that Mr. Goolsby may have been attempting to create a bidding war of sorts; however, insufficient evidence exists to support the hypothesis.  
  
Even absent proof of misconduct with regard to Mr. Goolsby's contract negotiations, the committee has decided that there is sufficient evidence that Mr. Goolsby has willfully violated 11.7.3, and we agree.   
  
Furthermore, OSCC Rule 34.6.18(b) states, in pertinent part, "No coaching or directing fee...or bonus shall be requested or levied...after the initial contract has been signed by the parties." In its history the OSCC has never been required to adjudicate this rule, generally preferring to leave contract disputes to the appropriate state courts. However, this rule has roots in a situation which occurred in the late 1970s in which a director, having previously executed a contract that allowed for a $2,000 bonus if the team advanced to the statewide competition, attempted to extort the school into paying him an additional $7,000 by threatening to quit ten days before the competition which would thereby leave the students unable to compete without a suitably-qualified coach. It appears Mr. Goolsby was clearly flying in the face of this rule when he attempted to garner additional promises of bonuses from each school despite the fact that he had a signed contract with each as early as June, 2010. Therefore, we find that Mr. Goolsby has also violated Rule 34.6.18(b).  
  
  
Unlawful Gifts to Performers  
  
In the course of its investigation, the committee uncovered significant evidence from eyewitnesses that Mr. Goolsby on at least three occasions used inducements to attract students to his teams. Any gifts, awards, preferential treatment, or promises of the same, to students, their families, their assignees or designees, or their staff or representatives, are clearly prohibited by multiple OSCC rules including 12.9.4, 12.10.16(e), 14.3.8, and 15.9.2(q) et.seq.  
  
The committee found undisputed evidence that at least three students were actively recruited to join Vocal Adrenaline. (While the names of all students contained in the transcripts have been redacted in the interest of privacy as they are under 18, the students were specifically named by witnesses called by the committee and verified through independent search of records). Most notably, one student was given a penthouse apartment less than two miles from Carmel Senior High School where he currently lives unsupervised while his parents and two sisters reside in Toledo. Another student, who began the year at McKinley High School on a foreign exchange program from her home in Cebu City, Republic of the Philippines, was given a condominium as well as a green card for her mother and an extended student visa. While we cannot feign to know how Mr. Goolsby would obtain such paperwork approval from the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, there is no dispute that he indeed did so as inducement to bring the student to Vocal Adrenaline.  
  
There have been allegations that similar tactics were used to attract students to the Dalton Academy Warblers; most notably, one student who had previously been a member of New Directions left under suspicious and somewhat-mysterious circumstances to attend Dalton Academy on a full music scholarship that specifically stated he would perform as a member of the Warblers during the North-Central Sectionals Competition A. The student did so - and, in fact, had a significant duet during the performance. However, because Dalton Academy does not have strict geographic boundaries for attendance as Carmel Senior High School or William McKinley High School do, because no other evidence of gifts could be found despite a deep search of publicly-available records, and because the standards for scholarships are subjective and individual to every school, neither the committee nor the OSCC as a whole find any wrongdoing as it relates to gifts to students at Dalton Academy.  
  
  
 **Actions To Be Taken**  
  
Based on the committee's findings, the OSCC hereby takes the following actions:  
  
1\. Mr. Goolsby is hereby  **barred from any further participation**  in OSCC events, which includes coaching, directing, consulting, recruiting, or otherwise contacting any schools under OSCC jurisdiction, whether such action is paid or unpaid, solicited or unsolicited.   
2\. All wins obtained by Mr. Goolsby or under his direction, in this or any other choral season, shall be hereby  **forefeitedpermitted to participate**  in the West Sectional Competition B on December 18, 2010; however, they must do so with a different coach. The committee further wishes to bar Vocal Adrenaline from using any numbers or routines prepared by Mr. Goolsby, but as OSCC does not require pre-submission of set lists this would be unenforceable by anything but the honor system.  
4\. All students having obtained gifts from Mr. Goolsby must  **return**  any monetary or physical gifts or awards. If the gift or award is no longer in their possession, they must make monetary restitution in the full and fair market value of the gift. These students will also be contacted individually by OSCC regarding the return.  
  
  
* * * * *  
  
When Kurt walked into Dalton on Thursday morning, he would have sworn Sue Sylvester had been there just long enough to pull them all into the deepest funk that ever funked.  
  
Kurt passed Ethan as he descended the grand staircase. His jacket was unbuttoned and his tie askew, and he kept muttering about fascists as he stalked angrily up the stairs. Kurt wondered if the Dean of Students was giving him a hard time again for sneaking off-campus to try to hit on girls during lunch - or maybe he'd gotten caught making out with a girl under the tree grove again.  
  
Charlie looked like he'd been crying for hours even though the school day was only ten minutes old - and, more importantly, it looked like he hadn't even bothered to comb his hair. His usual faux-hawk that was always impeccably slicked up looked as though it had exploded - tufts of hair sticking out at every conceivable angle. That was a  _really_ bad sign; the guy was as obsessive about his hair as Kurt was. They'd bonded more than once over the bathroom mirror closest to the auditorium after choreo rehearsals. "What happened?" he asked. Charlie just shook his head and choked on a sob as he walked past.  
  
As he continued down the hall towards his locker, Erek and one of the basses Kurt didn't really know yet but recognized stared at him. He hadn't gotten that look in awhile, the 'I don't know who you are but I don't trust you' look, and it unnerved him more than he wanted to admit.   
  
He took a side hall away from his own locker and towards Blaine's. When he arrived, he found his friend looking shell-shocked as he stared absently into his locker. "Blaine. What's going on?"  
  
Blaine looked over at him slowly. "The Committee stripped our win."  
  
He blinked. "Excuse me?"  
  
"Goolsby wasn't just coaching Vocal Adrenaline. He was creating a bidding war."  
  
"What do you mean?"  
  
Blaine closed his locker, bag over his shoulder, and began to walk down the hall as he explained. "A lot of our extracurriculars here are student-run so we don't have a lot of faculty advisers. Most of it's just overseen by the Student Activities Coordinator. For things like the Warblers, we bring a coach in on contract because there has to be an adult in charge of us for paperwork purposes, and it's competitive so the school wants the best possible director." He didn't add that, if the people who actually selected the director had any idea what they were doing, Goolsby would never have been selected. "When they're on contract, there are a lot of times bonuses if we win-"  
  
"Right," Kurt nodded. He remembered that much from the Dakota Stanley incident, an extra $10,000 if they placed.  
  
"Right. So he was trying to up his bonuses from both schools. Then not only would he get twice as much money when we both won Sectionals, but when we went up against each other at Regionals..." Blaine cringed like it was almost too painful to say, "The school that gave him the most money would win."  
  
Kurt stared at him. "He didn't  _do_  anything with us, how could he even guarantee something like that?"  
  
"I don't know. I don't want to know. Maybe he would coach Vocal Adrenaline weakly if we came up with more and really push them if they did, I don't know." He looked defeated, tired...beyond disappointed. "Anyway. The committee's ruling came down this morning. He's out and barred from competing in Ohio, the students he bribed into Vocal Adrenaline have to give back all the swag, and they still get to compete but with a new coach. But because we already performed..."  
  
"It's considered cheating and so we're disqualified?" Kurt asked slowly.  
  
"Yeah."  
  
Meaning New Directions would advance. If Lynn had been suspicious before- no wonder Erek and the other guy were staring at him like that. "You know I didn't do it, right?" he blurted out, then tried not to wince at how defensive he sounded. But given the way Blaine had barely been able to look at him the day before, his conspicuous silence when everyone else was jumping to either condemn or defend him...he needed to know Blaine knew he was innocent, that he wouldn't betray them - betray  _him_  - like that, not after everything.  
  
Blaine stared at him like he'd lost his mind. "Why would you say that? Of course I know you didn't do it."  
  
"Good," Kurt sighed in relief.  
  
"Lynn's gonna come down on you, though, and since he's on the board..." Blaine warned.  
  
"What's going to happen now?" he asked nervously, his fingers tightening on the strap of his bag.  
  
"I don't know. Find out this afternoon, I guess. But you have nothing to hide." Blaine offered a weak smile before peeling off to enter his English class.  
  
As it turned out, "this afternoon" meant a tribunal where it certainly didn't  _feel_  like he had nothing to hide.  
  
Lynn banged a gavel on the table at the front of the room. "The meeting shall come to order," he said, much more formally than most meetings began (usually with either "Hey, listen up!" or a few people beginning a song and waiting for everyone else to join in). He was flanked by the two other board members - a baritone named Thad whose blond hair reminded him of a more natural Sam, and Rick, a percussive who had always looked a little too much like Karofsky's cooler brother for Kurt's comfort. All seniors, none of whom knew him well, one of whom had openly disliked him since his first day.  
  
This couldn't end well.  
  
 _Nothing to hide._  Blaine's words echoed in his mind, but he would have felt a lot better if Blaine were one of their elected leaders instead of just being the de facto one.  
  
"As you've all heard by now, our win at Sectionals has been revoked after the conduct of our illustrious former-coach called our integrity into question," Lynn stated. "As some of you may have read in the document that's been circulating, while all of our students were cleared of wrongdoing by the Committee, there have been allegations that implicate one of our  _newer_  members," he said with a sharp look in Kurt's direction, "and we have some questions for him as well."  
  
Kurt drew in a deep breath and stood, hands clasped in front of him. "Yes?" he asked expectantly with enough edge in his voice to clearly say 'don't expect me to back down anytime soon.'  
  
"Well, let's start with the obvious question - did you make the allegations?"  
  
"Like I said when you asked me yesterday, and three days ago, and the day before that: No. I didn't speak with this Annette woman, I didn't speak with anyone who did speak with her. I know we didn't do anything wrong; why would I say that we did?"  
  
"You weren't happy when we won," Lynn stated, and though Kurt did his best not to glance around, he could see a few guys nodding.   
  
"I knew how much winning would have meant to my friends, my old teammates. That didn't mean-"  
  
"So you didn't think, 'let's give them the win anyway'?"  
  
"No."  
  
"You think he would go to all that trouble when he could've just sucked?" Wes asked.  
  
"He did miss a step," Thad pointed out.  
  
"Like you never have," Charlie replied cattily, though his eyes were still red. "Should we mention the 'Eleanor Rigby' incident of two falls ago? And I do mean  _two falls_?"  
  
"You guys remember how bad of a spy he was; if he was going to throw it, wouldn't we be able to tell?" David pointed out.  
  
"When did you find out about all of this?" Rick asked  
  
"All of what?" Kurt asked.  
  
"The other day, you didn't seem surprised to find out about any of it when we got the letter that they were starting the investigation. So when'd you find out?"  
  
"A-" 'friend' wasn't exactly the right word for Rachel, but it was simpler than 'My stepbrother's girlfriend'. "-former teammate posted the press release on Facebook, my best friend alerted me to it, so I found that out Sunday afternoon. As for Goolsby...I knew I didn't trust him before that but there was nothing I could put my finger on, if that's what you're asking, despite the dual-coaching-"  
  
Lynn's eyes flashed. "When did you find out about  _that_?" he asked.  
  
Kurt blinked as he tried to remember what he'd said. "About what?"  
  
"You knew he was coaching both teams?"  
  
This wasn't going to go well. He looked to Blaine for help, but Blaine was watching the whole thing with a kind of detached sadness. Some help he was going to be. "Yes."  
  
A murmur spread through the room. Lynn looked victorious; Rick looked pissed. Thad just looked confused. "When? And how?"  
  
If describing Rachel was difficult, Kurt was sure beginning with 'My boyfriend was visiting Vocal Adrenaline's former coach because she's raising the daughter he gave up for adoption last year' would sound even more convoluted. He considered misattributing the information, blaming Rachel since she  _was_  Shelby's daughter and all, but settled instead on, "My boyfriend saw him visiting Vocal Adrenaline's former coach, she mentioned who he was."  
  
"When did you find out?"  
  
"Three days before Sectionals."  
  
Kurt wasn't sure which was worse - the scandalized whispers, the self-satisfied look on the boards' faces, or the betrayed look Charlie gave him.  
  
"I checked the rule book - there was nothing against coaching more than one team at once, and I knew plenty of teams used the same choreographers or consultants, so there was nothing for me to even say before then. I didn't know about anything else that was in the investigation report, I assure you - the gifts to Vocal Adrenaline members, the bidding war...I only knew he was listed as coach of two teams at once, which is perfectly allowed within the rules. I was going to say something if we both won and would be competing against each other; absent that-"  
  
"Thank you, Kurt,' Lynn cut him off shortly. "But I think we've heard all we need to for today." Rick started to protest, but Lynn didn't want to hear any of it. "We will reconvene - except for you - to discuss what if any action to take. 3:00 sharp tomorrow," Lynn stated. With another bang of the gavel, the meeting was over as sharply as it had begun.  
  
* * * * *  
  
When New Directions convened at 3:30 on Thursday in the choir room, the excitement in the air was tempered, uneasy, almost hesitant - as though no one was sure whether they were actually allowed to be happy or not. After all, they had won, but it was kind of by default. There wasn't much victory in beating a group of grandparents with walkers. It was a win, it meant they were going on, and that was great, but it was kind of completely dissatisfying.  
  
Rachel was happy with it, but she was kind of the only one.   
  
When Mercedes kept texting but not to anyone else in the room, Puck could guess who it was. "He okay?" he asked simply.  
  
Mercedes shook her head. "He says it was bad. They had a whole thing where he had to get up in front of everyone and basically swear up and down it wasn't him, and now they're gonna burn the witch anyway."  
  
"If my dog's a witch but only when she's a girl, does that mean she's a cat?" Brittany asked.  
  
"Figures," Puck grumbled, rolling his eyes. Fucking prep-school punks who acted like they were all tolerant and enlightened and shit but still did the same social games as the Cheerios. It'd probably be easier if they just kicked Kurt's ass, at least  _that_  he knew how to deal with. This whole 'You're one of us but not really' thing was just gonna make the guy paranoid, and he had enough issues already - he didn't need that shit on top of it, especially not somewhere he thought he was safe. And where was that knight in shining armor Blaine guy with his curly hair and lameass single-word texts about courage and strength for this anyway, huh? The guy dragged Kurt over to that school and wasn't even gonna have his back? How fucked-up was that?  
  
"Yeah," Mercedes replied. "He won't know anything until tomorrow." Puck shook his head, arms crossed defiantly across his chest.  
  
"Wait - what?" Finn asked.  
  
"They think Kurt was playing double-agent," Puck replied.  
  
"Why?"  
  
"Well, is it the most ridiculous theory in the world?" Rachel asked. Everyone turned to stare at her, almost in slow motion, as if they were all silently asking 'she didn't  _really_  just say that, did she?' "What?"  
  
"Are you freaking insane?" Puck demanded.  
  
"You have to admit, the timing is all incredibly suspicious. If someone came here right before a competition with a really sudden way of being able to go to this school-"  
  
"You mean like Jesse?" Santana asked snottily.  
  
Rachel glared. "I'm speaking from experience."  
  
"First you said he was cheating because he was getting recruited by them the way Sunshine did-" Tina stated.  
  
"Who, by the way, only left because you sent her to a crackhouse," Artie interjected.  
  
"-and now you're saying he was cheating  _for_  us and being a double-agent? Why would he do that?"  
  
"Because obviously he liked us better and recognized our superior talent-"  
  
At that point it became impossible to sort out who was saying what in the jumble of disbelieving rants and angry insults. Mercedes looked like she was ready to kill Rachel for insulting her boy Kurt not once but twice. Artie just thought she was crazy. Santana was getting in any dig she could about Jesse because it was an easy target that obviously still bothered Rachel. But Puck's response summed them up the best.  
  
"Are you fucking kidding me? You think he'd screw up things somewhere he's happy so  _you_  can get something out of it? You're not even  _that_  nice to him!"  
  
"Woah, guys, what's going on?" Mr. Schue asked as he entered. "I thought you'd be celebrating by now." They fell silent, none of them feeling like ratting out Rachel and the inevitable teaching moment that would come from it. "C'mon, what's up?"  
  
"Rachel can't decide whether she thinks Kurt was spying against us or spying for us," Artie reported.  
  
"Guys, enough," he said firmly. "The committee said Kurt didn't do anything wrong. I told them what I knew about him leaving suddenly, I told them everything I knew about what happened with Sunshine, they made their decision and that's that. Let's move on."  
  
Even though he said it matter-of-factly, like he was already beyond it and really did want to move on, Finn shifted uncomfortably. He wasn't sure why something Mr. Schue said seemed kind of weird, like the thing about telling the investigators about Kurt leaving to go to Dalton, but he felt like something about it probably wasn't really cool. He glanced over at Puck, whose jaw was set like when he got  _really_  pissed but knew if he said anything he'd get suspended again, and Finn knew it meant he wasn't stupid, even if he couldn't really say why it wasn't okay.  
  
* * * * *  
  
The reconvening of the Warblers' death squad at 3:00 on Friday looked much as the previous day had, though with a notable absence. The atmosphere, however, was wholly different. While on Thursday the mood had been stunned, disappointed...by Friday they were out for blood. The 24-hour "cooling off period" had done nothing to quell the anger over the Committee's decision but had allowed for plenty of time to speculate as to what precisely may have gone down and exactly what Kurt knew when.   
  
The room was divided visually as well as figuratively - pro-Kurt forces had taken up residence next to the windows and on the righthand couch while Lynn's band of followers had the other two couches and the chairs by the door. A handful of undecideds were hanging out uncertainly next to the low coffee table as if they could make up their mind by hanging out with snacks and decided who was cheering the loudest.   
  
"Let's come to order," Lynn said with a bang of his gavel. "Now, as you all know, we're here to discuss what action should be taken against Kurt Hummel for his role in this entire sordid mess. As the Ohio Show Choir Committee has already ruled that he did not violate any of their rules, and as the matter has already been referred to the Dean of Discipline and relevant Assistant Principal for potential violations of the school rules and honor code, this meeting will deal  _solely_  with our rules as an organization. I'll open the floor, anyone wishing to speak may be heard."  
  
And so it began. Though more than half the hands went up, the first four Lynn called were all from solidly anti-Kurt parts of the group. By the time the third one accused Kurt of hiding his spying abilities when he visited the first time and deliberately dressing in a poor imitation of the uniform so that no one would suspect him now, Ethan rolled his eyes and asked, "What's next? Are you going to accuse him of stealing the Lindbergh baby, too?"  
  
The real theme was clear, though. For the most part, the guys could be convinced that he hadn't been the one to tip off the authorities, but he should have said something before. After all, if they'd known and dumped Goolsby before Sectionals, they wouldn't have lost. They would have been able to do the exact same routine just as well - or come up with an even better one if someone required it, it wasn't like they didn't have at least a dozen other suitable replacements, even Teenage Dream would have been good if not quite accessible enough for the competition judges - but their win wouldn't have been stripped from them because of the appearance of impropriety.   
  
They were angry. They felt as if  _they_  had been cheated, and Kurt was the only one around who could have cheated them. Goolsby was out, but they knew he was ineffective, so clearly he couldn't be the one at fault.  
  
Blaine couldn't take it anymore. They hadn't known Kurt long but they certainly knew him better than  _this_. He had to say something. He couldn't just let them-  
  
He had brought Kurt here. He had arranged the audition, the scholarship, everything, because he was trying to protect Kurt and bring him somewhere he could see that people were accepting and decent and not going to kill you for being who you were. There had been some guilt mixed into his motivation too, sure - namely the part where he told Kurt to stand up to the bullies and the kid had actually listened to him, gotten his ass kicked,  _and_  gotten suspended for escaping with his life (and apparently a win) - but mostly it was because he really and truly believed this would be the best place for the guy he had grown to really consider a friend. Kurt needed to be here - no. He  _deserved_  to be here. He had auditioned like any other potential Warbler or scholarship recipient. Kurt had proven himself in every conceivable way, and to be taken out for this kind of crap when he hadn't done anything wrong...  
  
What was happening to his group?  
  
When Blaine'd gotten to Dalton, they'd been incredibly talented but largely in disarray and he held them together long enough for it all to gel - then things took off from there and turned into this incredible group he could be proud of. Now they were turning on each other under the guise of just turning on the new kid, and he couldn't help but feel like he'd failed them in more ways than one.  
  
"I knew," he said from his place by the window, and every head snapped towards him. "I knew he was coaching both teams. He's also got one in Pennsylvania."  
  
"What are you talking about?" Thad demanded.  
  
He strode to the center of the room. "Goolsby's not exactly stealthy, and we have our spies. If you just google him you can figure out that he's at Carmel. Are you going to kick me out of the group now, for not saying anything?"  
  
Wes and David looked at each other like Blaine had lost his mind, but Charlie had a grin on his face that he tried miserably to cover with his hand. His nails were painted black (it was a statement of his ennui), a choice that had almost gotten him detention during second period until he pointed out that it was Friday when the rules were more relaxed. He knew the direction this had turned could only be good for Kurt.  
  
"Kurt was right about the rules, Lynn. If you don't know that, you need to read the rulebook again. There's nothing in the show choir regulations that says you can't coach more than one team at once. The Committee exonerated him."  
  
"We're not talking about that. We're talking about Dalton rules. We have a strict honor code in the group, and very high standards."  
  
"You think he violated the Warbler honor code by failing to come forward about a rule that he knew for a fact wasn't being broken?" Blaine asked skeptically. "So...if he doesn't see someone being beaten up should he go to the police?" The line got a snicker from a few of the sophomore guys, which Blaine took as a small victory.   
  
"The scholarship is still suspect," Rick stated with a furrowed brow.  
  
"Arranged entirely by me," Blaine replied firmly.  
  
"Look," Thad said, "I get it. You brought him here, you don't want it to reflect badly on you, but we're not blaming you. We  _all_  got played here, it's not-"  
  
"You guys have no idea what he went through at his old school. He didn't just come check us out because he was spying he was absolutely miserable. They tortured him and the administration didn't care. I was the first gay guy his age he'd ever met - he told me so. Even his boyfriend wasn't gay," he added with a roll of his eyes. "I'd been there and I wanted to help, so I brought him in to audition and get him a scholarship. The administration granted it on my recommendation and with group approval - I seem to recall it being a unanimous decision." There were nods from the window and the group around the coffee table. "If you're talking about voting him out, then either you think the entire past two months is an elaborate ruse, or you are seriously talking about kicking someone out of the group for not coming forward about something he knew wasn't actually improper. Or you think he knew more about the double-coaching than he's told you, but I haven't heard anyone say that." With that, having said his piece, he returned to his place by the window.  
  
Lynn knew he was fighting a losing battle. The board could direct the conversation, but membership got to vote on any action this large. "Fine. All those in favour of removing Kurt Hummel as a Warbler?" Rick counted and tallied, writing the figure on his notepad. "All opposed?" Rick counted again, then nodded in confirmation of what anyone looking around the room could see to be the result.  
  
"I'll let him know," Blaine stated, already pulling out his phone. He couldn't suppress a smile.  
  
* * * * *  
  
"So you're cleared or whatever?" Puck asked.  
  
Kurt nodded. "Apparently. Blaine texted right after I got home. It took about an hour to deliberate but they ultimately realized I hadn't done anything wrong. According to him, the demonstrated poorness of my spying capabilities were my best defense."  
  
"You do suck at it," Puck replied as he sat on the tufted couch.   
  
Kurt rolled his eyes. "I'm just glad it's done. Do you know how frustrating it is to spend the entire day defending yourself against things that you didn't-" When Puck raised an eyebrow, Kurt allowed, "...I suppose you would, wouldn't you?" He knelt on the couch, legs straddling Puck's, and draped his arms over Puck's shoulders. "You know, when I wanted you guys to win instead, I certainly didn't mean I wanted this much drama to come of it."  
  
"They try to call you out on that one?" Puck asked as he wrapped his arms around Kurt's slim waist. "Say you threw it or something?"  
  
"One guy did. Everyone else looked at him like he was crazy and said if I was going to throw it, I probably would have done something like screw up my duet. Or, for that matter, actually  _done_  something instead of just not celebrating on the bus."  
  
"This the same guy who said you filed the complaint?"  
  
"Lynn, yeah."  
  
"Sounds like a real great guy." Puck leaned up to kiss him. Now that all this crap was over - and now that they were done with the extra-long practices every freaking day - it was time to start making up for lost opportunities. Hanging out together was nice, yeah, and he was even willing to watch crappy chick-flick DVDs with the guy all day when he was stuck watching his sister (which was more than he'd ever be willing to do for any girl except  _maybe_  Quinn and even then she'd have to be giving him something pretty good for it, which she wouldn't do), but he had needs. Judging from the way the kiss was being returned, so did Kurt.  
  
Finn knocked on the basement door and called loudly, "I'm coming down so please stop doing anything that would freak me out!"  
  
Kurt started to move away, but Puck kept his arms securely around Kurt's waist. "We're fully clothed, dude," he called back.  
  
Finn's footsteps were heavy on the basement stairs - Kurt suspected deliberately so - but he was pleasantly surprised that the look they got was only a little awkward instead of openly disgusted. Finn had come a long way; at this point, Kurt could honestly believe that the look probably had more to do with the fact that he'd known Puck since they were like 7 meaning it was kind of like watching his two brothers making out. Kurt supposed that was a reasonable enough kind of weirdness and not one that needed to be hashed out in any great detail. "The Fed-Ex guy just brought it, it's addressed to you." He handed out a cardboard envelope, which Kurt took curiously. "It's way too flat to be something you bought online, and it's got your dad's name on there too..."  
  
Kurt tore off the easy-open strip at the top and pulled out a letter-sized envelope bearing the Dalton Academy crest. He wasn't sure what in the world they would be sending him that was time-sensitive enough to be Fed-Exed; normally things should either get handed to him at school if it was important, or newsletter kind of things would get sent to him by regular mail, wouldn't they?   
  
He had a bad feeling about this.   
  
No, he told himself. He was still new there, this could be a midterm progress report thing for all he knew. Something about how his credits from McKinley were transferring. Some kind of private information they didn't want to hand out to everyone at school but that was completely routine. He hadn't been at Dalton long enough to know if this was actually something strange, or just something he'd never experienced before.  
  
With a slight quiver in his hand that he tried to hide, he carefully opened the envelope and unfolded the page inside. Though he read every word, only some of them registered.  
  
 _Due to recent allegations...  
  
...failure to disclose...  
  
...honor code...  
  
This potential violation...  
  
...terms of award...  
  
...regardless of actual misconduct.  
  
No further disciplinary action...  
  
...continued enrollment...  
  
...due immediately._  
  
Puck watched him as he read and recognized the mask going up immediately. It wasn't nearly as seamless as when he'd seen it before; this time it looked like Kurt was fighting it valiantly, trying to find some way that pretending he didn't care what the letter said would actually make him not care. His face was ashen with no hint of rosiness, eyes wide but cold, posture stiff and unmoving but with his arms drawn in close to his body like when he was on the verge of tears. "What the fuck did they say?" he demanded.  
  
It took Kurt a moment to speak, and when he did his voice was tight and raspy but with an affected disaffection like he was trying to sound like he used to but couldn't quite remember how. "The evil fictional puppetmaster giveth and he taketh away," he intoned darkly. When he was met with a blank stare from Finn and a furrowed brow from Puck, he handed the letter listlessly to Puck and slipped out of his arms, walking towards the shower. "They just revoked my scholarship."


	8. Chapter 8

The majority of his forty-five minute shower was spent with his forehead pressed against the cool tile, trying to summon the energy to reach over a few feet and grab his most luxurious 'for emergencies only' body scrub. It was just out of reach and he couldn't quite manage to care enough.  
  
It wasn't as though the right shower products would fix things anyway.  
  
Every few minutes he heard the door open, then click closed again a few seconds later. Someone was checking up on him - he rolled his eyes and it almost took more energy than he had. It would have been easy enough to guess the paranoid culprit, but the conversation snippets he overheard made it all the easier.  
  
"I gotta get home, my mom's freaking out - she's gotta leave in like ten minutes and I'm not there."  
  
"I'll watch him, dude."  
  
"And check on him every couple minutes."  
  
"What? Dude, c'mon."  
  
"What?"  
  
"But he's naked in there."  
  
"Duh. It's a shower."  
  
"Yeah, but-"  
  
"Oh come  _on_ , dude, he's your brother! It's not gay if he's your brother!"  
  
He felt like he should laugh at that, or at least roll his eyes or be annoyed by Finn's still-latent paranoia or  _something_ , but he couldn't feel anything. Just the cool damp tiles against his face and the hot water beating down on his shoulders. It was probably for the best, he knew logically; if he could feel enough to mock Finn, he'd be able to feel... _everything else_ , and he wasn't ready for that.  
  
He couldn't do this. Going back there, back to McKinley-  
  
He turned his head to press his cheek to the tile instead. It gave him something else to focus on.  
  
He didn't specifically remember washing himself, but at some point he looked over and saw the body scrub on a closer shelf than it had been, a little emptier than it was when last he looked. He ran his fingers through his hair and felt it freshly conditioned. That was probably a sign he should get out, right? After all, if he blanked out long enough to get clean, who knew how long he'd been in there? His dad would be none too thrilled if he used all the hot water before he got home from the shop...assuming his dad wasn't home already. He honestly had no idea anymore.  
  
When he emerged into the bedroom clad in a fluffy robe, Finn was sitting anxiously on the edge of the bed. "Hey, dude," he offered with a fake bright smile that Kurt kind of wanted to throw things at.  
  
"Hello."  
  
"Puck had to go - his mom was kinda freaking out because she had to get to work and his sister's there and he wasn't home yet-"  
  
"I know," Kurt replied evenly. "I could hear you. By the way, he's right - it's not gay, I'm your brother. We live together; you might occasionally see a naked butt cheek. It doesn't make you gay." He rolled his eyes and padded slowly to the closet to sift through his collection of clothes.   
  
"...Sorry," Finn offered quietly. "I'm not, y'know-"  
  
"I know." He knew it wasn't like it had been, the fact that Finn wasn't scrambling out of the room the first chance he got, that he'd actually listened to something Puck said about keeping an eye on him - as unnecessary as it was...he knew Finn had evolved, at least a little.  
  
"You need anything?" Finn asked.  
  
He needed a lot. Just nothing Finn could give him. "No. Thank you."  
  
"I could make tea or something. I...might screw it up 'cause I don't really get how that mesh ball thing works, but if you told me how I'd make it for you."  
  
Finn was trying, he knew that, so he glanced in Finn's direction and forced a faint, weary smile. He felt numb, detached, like this was some convoluted story he was reading. It wasn't his life, right? It couldn't be his life. Not after everything else.  
  
He wasn't used to absent denial hitting him first. He tended to leap right over that to sobbing. But this...it was simultaneously too big of a deal and not quite bit enough. It was more than having Finn throw hate-filled slurs in his face but not as big as his father almost dying, and apparently this was his grey area, a kind of emotional valley between tear-filled peaks.  
  
He wasn't sure if forcing himself to feel something would be better or worse. On one hand, he felt like he should; on the other, once the tears started they would easily last for a solid week. Or at least for the weekend.   
  
He drew in a deep breath and decided that, if he was going to segue from numb to melancholy, he should at least be suitably dressed. He selected a pair of soft grey trousers, his white henley, and an emerald green pullover that hadn't emerged from its special place on the far right of his closet in a couple years; he hadn't had the heart to wear it while his dad was in the hospital, it felt almost like jinxing things, but now...even pulling it on, breathing in the faint scent lingering at the collar felt cathartic.  
  
"Burt should be home soon," Finn called from his place on the bed just as Kurt emerged from the walk-in, so he repeated more quietly, "Burt should be home soon."  
  
"Did you call him?"  
  
"No - it's Friday, dude."  
  
Of all the things he lacked the energy or ambition for, dinner was at the top of his list. He tugged the sweater down a little - he'd grown more than he realized and it was too short now, but he couldn't bear the thought of taking it off. "Then we need to go start dinner," Kurt said quietly, his voice flat.  
  
"I already called for pizza."  
  
"That's not Friday dinner," he replied sharply as the first twinges of frustration began to claw their way in around the edges of the kind of lost feeling.  
  
"It is tonight," Finn shrugged.  
  
To be honest, he didn't think there was a single thing he could make right now without either screwing it up or lighting things on fire. "Thank you," he offered quietly.  
  
* * * * *  
  
He was worried.  
  
There. He said it.  
  
He was a badass, and badasses didn't worry about shit. They either did something or they didn't give a fuck about it. One or the other. Sitting and worrying about crap was for punks.  
  
And apparently for this. Because he certainly gave a fuck, but there wasn't really anything he could do to fix it.  
  
How could the fuckers kick Kurt out of school for something like this? No one had cheated except the jerkoff coach, why was that Kurt's fault? If it wouldn't get him sent back to juvie he'd be plotting revenge already, but the guy had done a pretty good job of convincing him he should probably be sticking around in the outside world for awhile, so that was out.  
  
So he was stuck with shit he knew absofuckinglutely nothing about: trying to make Kurt feel better.  
  
Okay, he knew one thing that made Kurt feel better, but this was kind of bigger than something sex could really  _fix_. Not like he wouldn't have all the sex Kurt wanted or whatever, but considering their previous forays into comfort sex had ended once with sobbing and once with clinging, he wasn't sure it actually... _worked_  for them the way it needed to.  
  
He knew what he did when things really sucked - mostly stuff he was specifically barred from doing on his probation, or tossing dweebs around at school; not only was Kurt probably not going to be into that, but given everything that happened before he left McKinley he'd probably be pissed that Puck still did it. (What? Not to gay kids or anything, but that was never why he'd picked on Kurt in the first place anyway. Just Jacob ben Israel and the guys in the AV club. They deserved it.) He knew Finn did a lot of sulking and video game marathons and sometimes - if he was going  _really_  crazy - went running or something so he was too tired to think about shit. That one was rare, but he'd gotten dragged along on it once. Sam hung out in the weight room for hours. But none of that was really stuff  _Kurt_  would do.  
  
Okay, so what was he supposed to be doing - or volunteering to do - if it wasn't that kind of stuff? He thought shopping or something, but last time he'd offered that - when Kurt was stuck at McKinley last time, before he got to go to that fucking school in the first place - Kurt had turned him down. Maybe it was just something he did with Quinn and Mercedes and, y'know, girls or something.   
  
The guy probably sang when he was depressed, right? Like Rachel? ...That still didn't give him anything  _he_  could do to help. It was more a 'Kurt alone in his basement' thing to deal with shit.   
  
This was the problem with dating Kurt, he concluded. He wasn't a girl but wasn't quite a dude either. Figuring out what he wanted got complicated. He couldn't really go ask other gay guys what to suggest or surprise him with or whatever to make him feel better.  
  
...or could he?  
  
"Hey, gimme the computer," he told Sarah.  
  
"I'm using it."  
  
"You're talking to your stupid friends. This is important."  
  
"C'mon, Noah!"  
  
"It's for something for Kurt," he said. That worked like a charm - he knew it would. She liked the guy a lot better than she liked her big brother; how was that for gratitude? With her in the room to text all her friends about what a pain in the ass he was, Puck opened the browser and googled "gay dude depressed" - that should totally work.  
  
He wasn't expecting to get six pages of news stories on gay dudes killing themselves.  
  
Screw worried - now he was fucking  _scared_.  
  
Reaching over, he snagged his phone and typed out a quick  _u ok?_  to Kurt, trying not to tap his thumbs anxiously on the keyboard while he waited for a response.  
  
The response was simple, but the fact that it came at all was enough for now.  _I'm fine. Mocking Finn._  
  
That could always cheer someone up, right?   
  
He'd known in the back of his mind that was something to be concerned about - he must have, right? Otherwise why would he have kept peeking in on Kurt in the-...okay, fine, he didn't need a reason to want to see his boyfriend's ass in the shower. But why would he have made Finn promise to keep checking after he had to leave? He must have known to be worried the guy would try and off himself or something. But putting other stories with it made it a lot harder to brush off as paranoia.  
  
There was a whole website of videos to try and tell people things would be okay, including a few from people he'd heard of - thanks to Kurt, of course, but still. There was that guy from the show with the fashion designers who said stupid crap like "get it done" or "make it work" or something. And a couple designers he knew Kurt wore stuff from. He could totally steal some of their lines and say it, make Kurt feel better.  
  
Until he watched a couple and realized they were all about how some day you'd get out of your crappy high school and people wouldn't suck so much. There wasn't a video for what happened when you'd gotten out of your shitty life and had to go  _back_.  
  
He wondered if that guy Kurt talked about a lot had one of the videos. The designer with the weird sweaters who did all the crazy shoes for that Gaga chick like the ones Kurt had worn. That McQueen dude - he felt ridiculous that he even knew the name, but figured since he was like Kurt's number one designer guy, plus it was a name that  _sounded_ like a gay guy from Scotland.  
  
Shit. Okay, rethinking that plan. The guy killed himself like a year ago. That wasn't helpful. Kind of made things worse, actually.  
  
So he stuck with his other plan, which would definitely not be called hovering. More like...vigilance. That was it. Definitely more badass than hovering. Hovering was what Jewish mothers did and the really annoying MILFs who carried around jugs of hand sanitizer for when their kids touched dirt. Vigilance was what snipers did, and those guys didn't miss  _anything_.  
  
* * * * *  
  
As much as Kurt appreciated getting texts every five minutes from Puck, it was starting to get old already. The fact that, if he didn't respond within thirty seconds, another text came? That was just kind of sad.  
  
Sweet, he knew, on some level, but mostly just irritating.  
  
Not as irritating as Finn watching him drink tea, though. He'd finally agreed to let Finn fix some for him because his stepbrother seemed so wholly eager to help but without any real concept of  _how_...it was kind of like letting a five year old set the table because they want to help but really aren't big enough to do anything involving the stove yet.   
  
Finn leaped to his feet, nearly knocking the chair over, as he heard the side door open, announcing Burt's arrival. Kurt didn't take his eyes off the cup of tea - he couldn't. He couldn't tell his father - his father who had been willing to offer to risk his college fund to get him into Dalton so he could be safe, who Kurt knew worried much more than he should have been when he was at McKinley before - that he'd gotten his one shot at the school taken away. And not just because his dad would take the flamethrower to Dalton before dawn.  
  
Then it would be real.  
  
Telling Puck, Finn hearing, that was different. For one thing he was still in shock at the time, and it was just showing them what someone else had said. But the point at which he had to open his mouth and admit that his grand escape had failed-  
  
He couldn't take that.  
  
Finn met his stepfather just inside the door. "Hey," he said quietly.  
  
Burt looked at him oddly as he unknotted his boots and took them off on the linoleum floor. "What's up, kid?"  
  
"Kurt, um-"  
  
Burt stood and looked past Finn's shoulder. "What happened? Why's he wearing that?"  
  
Finn blinked and looked back towards Kurt. He didn't get why it was weird enough for Burt to ask about - the pants were kinda normal, actually, especially for Kurt, and the shirt was like one every guy had. The sweater was kinda small on the guy, but not  _that_  small, and it wasn't even like there were bows or drawings or anything on it. "Wearing what?"  
  
"The sweater - it was his mom's, he wore it around for like a month straight after she died. He only wears it when stuff's really bad - what the hell happened?"  
  
"He got a letter that they're taking away his scholarship."  
  
Burt's eyes widened and he brushed past Finn. "Kurt. What the hell happened?" he demanded. When he saw his son flinch and keep staring at the table, he sat across from him and softened his voice. "What's this about school?"  
  
He had an entire detached speech planned, strictly facts, arranged chronologically, to tell the story without caring. But when he opened his mouth to speak it was like a pavlovian cry response started. He shouldn't have been surprised, it was practically a foregone conclusion with him, but he had still hoped to retain at least some semblance of his dignity. At some point breaking down in tears at every disappointment became a level of pathetic even his superior fashion sense couldn't erase.  
  
Though calling this 'a disappointment' was such an understatement it almost made him laugh. Disappointing was when he got an A- on a French test he should have gotten a perfect score on, it was getting outbid on a vintage Chanel scarf on eBay with 30 seconds left, it was a Michael Kors menswear line.   
  
He was about to be thrown from Oz back into Kansas, but with added slushies and about two hundred Ms. Gulches.   
  
"There were... _allegations_ ," he began slowly, "that Dalton cheated at Sectionals because our coach also coached Vocal Adrenaline." He hadn't told his father any of the story yet - and judging by the confused look, apparently Finn hadn't said anything either. "I knew he coached both, but that's not against the rules - people do it all the time, with consultants and choreographers in particular - and even the show choir committee admitted that he didn't do anything wrong there. He did a lot of other things that resulted in his being barred from all competition in the state, but that wasn't one of them." He drew in a deep breath, trying not to sniffle as he did, and ran his thumb absently over the handle of the teacup. "According to Dalton, the fact that I knew - as well as the part where my name was dragged through the mud because someone I've yet to identify said that my scholarship may have been a gift to steal me away from New Directions - was a "potential and perceived violation of the Dalton Academy Honor Code."  
  
"They're kicking you out of school for not speaking up when you didn't do anything wrong?" Burt demanded.  
  
Kurt looked at him sadly. "Not kicking me out. Just taking away the money that got me there," he said resignedly. Everyone in the room knew it was the same thing.  
  
"We'll protect you," Finn stated quietly, sincerely, from over by the fridge. "I talked to Sam, he's gonna talk to Artie and Mike - the five of us are gonna look out for you. I know it was bad before, and I...y'know, kinda made it worse but I get it now, and we're gonna make sure they can't throw you around anymore." The fact that Finn honestly believed it was true, as evidenced by the look on his face, was sweet. Naive. Kind of cute, to be honest. But ultimately wholly ineffective. "Azimio and Karofsky, they can hit a girl but they can't hit a guy in a wheelchair - Artie showed me. And the guys who are still okay tossing Artie around, they can't hit girls, so if we get Mercedes in on-"  
  
"Thank you," Kurt whispered, "But honestly right now I can't-...no amount of support is going to make me able to go back there."  
  
Finn looked hurt, like he didn't understand why his plan wasn't going to work. Big brothers were supposed to look out for the little ones, right? And even if he was only older my a couple months, he was a lot taller than Kurt and had more clout and that totally counted. So why wouldn't that e enough?  
  
"Whatcha want to do?" Burt asked gently. "The home school thing?"  
  
"I don't know. Maybe. I can't even..." Kurt sighed softly and shook his head. "I don't know anything right now."  
  
Burt nodded and took Kurt's hand across the table. "Whatever you want, okay buddy? Home school, they got these things online now where it's all gay kids and you do class on those cameras, if another school's got good policies so you can still do all your choir stuff...whatever you want, that's what we'll do."  
  
That wasn't a consolation at all. What he  _wanted_  wasn't going to happen. He'd had everything he could possibly want at Dalton and he couldn't think of a single other place that could compare. Home schooling was probably his best option as far as his physical safety went, but he'd finally - for the first time in his life - gotten used to not feeling isolated and was going to be shoved into his room all day to never see a human being outside his family and Puck. He was finally starting to enjoy the company of other people - and other  _guys_  at that, guys who treated him like an equal, like a member of a group instead of the constant outsider who would never be 'right' or 'okay' no matter how hard he tried or how much of himself he suppressed, and now-  
  
He wanted to- not  _die_ , he recognized logically that things wouldn't remain this bad forever, more like...hibernate for two and a half years until he could move to New York and try to put together some semblance of the fantasyland he'd been living in for the past six weeks. He wanted to disappear and magically regenerate after his eighteenth birthday so he could go on to live his fabulous life but skip the part where he was stuck either completely alone or in a school where he could never be safe - no matter how well-meaning and earnest Finn was - because looking at  _two and a half freaking years_  of that was seriously too much to handle.   
  
Two and a half years was a long time. He remembered what life had been like for him two and a half years  _ago_ , how far in the past all of that was. Hell, he'd still been in the closet then and it felt like he'd been out  _forever_. An equidistant future was too far to ever really believe in.  
  
* * * * *  
  
By the time the doorbell rang at 9:15, Sarah was already in bed and Puck was...'anxious' wasn't the right word, and he definitely wasn't pacing or some lame shit like that, but he may have been taking out some frustration on his video game handset.  
  
What? It was Mortal Kombat, and you couldn't beat the guy's head in without pounding on the buttons like that. The reason the controller broke was it was like fifteen years old or some shit. And the punk he scared the Super NES off of probably beat on it first.  
  
He didn't jump up or anything to get the door, but he was already going to be getting up to get something to drink anyway so he got to the door pretty quickly. Kurt looked like shit; he wasn't really  _surprised_  by that, but it was still never a good thing to see. "Hey."  
  
"Hey," Kurt whispered back as he entered. His eyes were red, his cheeks flushed, lips pink so they almost looked swollen - all pretty standard. But mostly it was just the exhaustion that had Puck uneasy. Looking like that, he was surprised Kurt had the energy to drive over there or still be standing or whatever, he looked like he might keel over at any second.  
  
Asking 'how are you' seemed like the stupidest fucking thing he could possibly ask right then, so he went instead with, "How was dinner?"  
  
Kurt shrugged , head twitching to the side just a bit, and unbuttoned his jacket. "Has Carole always been the kind of person to try obsessively to cheer someone up when they're down?"  
  
"Yeah," Puck confirmed. When he wanted to just go hit things as a kid, she wanted to ply him with cookies and board games and crap; it didn't work.  
  
"It explains a lot about Finn," Kurt observed dryly. "Why he still sees everything in rainbows and butterflies and puppies and other creatures one might find on a Lisa Frank binder." Even if Finn would no doubt have something to say about the girly implications of that, Puck couldn't inherently disagree with the broader observation. "So dinner was...unbearably long."  
  
"Sorry."  
  
Kurt shrugged again. "Whatever. It's done. All of it's just...done." As he crossed to the sofa, Puck went to the freezer to produce the fruits of his evening. He handed the carton, along with a spoon, to Kurt who stared at it like it was entirely in Hebrew or something. (It wasn't, Puck checked). "What is this?"  
  
"What's it say?"  
  
"Organic ginger soy yogurt with honey?"  
  
"Yeah." When Kurt continued to stare at him, Puck explained, "I was gonna get ice cream or something, but you have that healthy crap at your house instead. Only I didn't know what kind it was, and most of it's like ten bucks, right? So I found this one. It's organic - it says so. And low fat. And no sugar added."  
  
Kurt couldn't decide if it was the sweetest or most demented gesture he'd ever seen. The fact that he found it sweet meant he'd probably been hanging out with Finn too much lately if something like this was starting to make sense to him. But Puck meant well. "Thank you," he said with a faint smile - it wasn't much, but it was genuine. "I'm not really the emotional eater, though. Kind of the opposite."  
  
"Oh," Puck replied. Well, shit. The one thing he'd come up with and it failed.  
  
"Let's go upstairs," Kurt suggested, and Puck had a hunch he knew where that meant the evening was going. No problem - that he could do without fucking it up, no pun intended. He was damn good at making sure Kurt felt good enough to forget all the shit going on in his life, and for once he wouldn't even blame the guy for breaking down in tears afterwards or whatever. He wouldn't even take it personally.  
  
When they got upstairs, he expected Kurt to kind of jump him - like last time, like when school had gotten really shitty before. He didn't; if anything, he looked...lost. Unfocused. Like he couldn't find his way to his own dick with both hands if his life depended on it. Usually Puckasawrus would take control of the situation, but the blank look made it kind of...skeevy. Like totally taking advantage of the guy or something.  
  
Puck wasn't sure what to do with that. He'd never thought of sex like that before, even though he had more than his share of sex with emotionally vulnerable women - and Kurt on a couple occasions.  
  
He decided he'd make clear he was available instead. If Kurt wanted something, he was more than capable of making the next move after that. He laid on his back in the middle of the bed, clad in his A-frame undershirt and a pair of loose-fitting gym shorts that were very easy to maneuver if Kurt wanted, and looked at Kurt with a quirked eyebrow.  
  
Kurt wanted to - he stared at Puck outstretched on the bed, all hot and muscular and completely jump-worthy...and he knew sex would make him feel better. He knew that from experience. But somehow even the idea of everything he normally found completely hot and irresistible wasn't enough. He wanted it to be -  _God_  how he wanted to be able to stop thinking and just lose himself in the feeling of Puck's mouth on his neck and dick up his ass, but the thought of getting himself there was too exhausting to be appealing.  
  
"C'mere," Puck said softly, and he froze. Not like Puck would ever pressure him into things, he knew that, but it was clear what was expected and he didn't feel like dealing with-  
  
Puck's arm was out to one side, and Kurt could already see the place he wanted to be. There was a little hollow by Puck's collarbone where his head fit, and he cursed himself for being so pathetic and ridiculous - and when the hell had he gotten himself hooked on physical comfort, anyway? He was someone who had barely been touched for his entire life, he wasn't an especially huggy or touchy person, and he had done just fine that way. Why was it that, as soon as Puck was in the room and he was miserable, he wanted to throw himself into Puck's arms and cling like a toddler or something?  
  
With all his self control so he didn't risk spooking his non-cuddling boyfriend, he walked slowly to the bed, removed his sweater and boots, and laid down beside Puck in a position that had long been badass-approved - or, at least, not objected-to. He let out a soft sigh as Puck's arm tightened around him, drawing him closer, and he draped himself over Puck's side a little more heavily.  
  
"What can I do?" Puck asked quietly, looking him in the eye. It wasn't a question he was used to asking, and though it was one Kurt was getting frustratingly used to hearing tonight...  
  
His jaw tightened and he half-rolled his eyes, like it was almost painful for him to voice his request. In a way it was; if he felt ridiculous for his constant waterworks before, there was absolutely no way to sound dignified as he said, "Just don't move."  
  
Puck nodded. His arm was already starting to ache, like Kurt was pinching off blood flow to his hand or something, but he didn't hesitate before replying, "You got it."  
  
Kurt smiled faintly and tried to joke, "Don't worry - I won't tell anyone I tamed you enough to get you cuddling or anything." His voice was tight and exhausted, and Puck kind of wondered why he bothered trying to pretend with that shit. It was just the two of them, and he wasn't fooled by it. Certainly not anymore.  
  
Maybe Kurt was trying to fool himself with it. He could kind of get that.   
  
They laid in silence for quite awhile, Kurt just kind of staring past Puck's shoulder at the wall just beneath the window, trying not to think of anything. It wasn't until Puck's broad hand slid up further, his fingers moving just a little through the hair at the back of his neck, that he finally drifted to sleep.  
  
* * * * * *  
  
He awoke from a dead sleep to pulsing vibrations against his groin. It felt kinda good, actually, but Kurt didn't move. He lifted his head - dude was still breathing, that much was obvious, but he didn't even seem to notice the crotch-buzzing or the accompanying semi-hard it was producing. After a few long buzzes, a pause, then a short pulse. A minute passed, then another pulse, then a few more.  
  
Now this was just annoying. It wasn't consistent enough to feel good anymore and was kind of like a really weird torture device - like on that old game show on comedy Central where you'd have to answer questions and if you got it wrong they sent shocks through you, but this time putting a joy buzzer on your dick. He shifted under Kurt's weight and felt Kurt's fingers clutch more tightly at the fabric of his undershirt even though there was no other indication of consciousness. Akwardly he fished the phone out of Kurt's front pocket - it was the first time he'd had his hands in someone's pants where he wasn't trying to get them off, he noted with a quirked eyebrow - and tried to figure out how to turn the thing to silent.  
  
Two missed calls from Kurt's dad, two voicemails, and four texts that were all variations on "Where are you? Are you okay?" Plus a text from Finn that read  _rents r freaked dude_.  
  
The time at the top of the screen gave him a pretty good reason to be worried, Puck guessed - it was after 2:30.  
  
The guy was probably scared Kurt had gotten drunk or driven off a cliff or something. He could get that. Not like he'd spent the first half of the night worrying or anything...and if anyone in the world was protective of Kurt, it was his dad. He kind of envied that, actually - if he went missing overnight no one would even notice. Kurt was gone a few hours and people collectively freaked the fuck out.  
  
With his left arm still around Kurt, he attempted to reply one-handed. The first message to Kurt's dad was easy enough:  
  
 _its puck hes w me_  
  
After thinking a moment, he added a second text to clarify:  
  
 _hes asleep n has pants on_  
  
A pause, then a third text:  
  
 _pls dont kill me_  
  
He was expecting the next thing he heard to be Kurt's dad storming the house to kick his ass or something, or at least forcibly drag Kurt back to his own house. Instead came a response:  
  
 _Ill see him in the morning then night_  
  
Puck set the phone on the nightstand. His chest was cool and damp and the room seemed even quieter than most nights - he could see Kurt breathing but couldn't really hear it, aside from the occasional sharp sniffle. His heart ached - he kind of knew it could do that but it still wasn't something he was used to - as he realized the reason his chest was wet was because the guy was literally crying into his shirt in his sleep.  
  
And there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.  
  
He awkwardly reached down to snag the comforter and drew it up over them. Kurt still didn't move, just kept clinging in a way Puck knew would absolutely be denied in the morning. Puck drew in a long, slow, frustrated breath as he let the badass act slip and realized for exactly the second time in his life how completely powerless he was, guns or no guns.


	9. Chapter 9

When Kurt awoke, it took him a minute to remember where he was and what had happened. His head felt heavy but like it was floating away from his body all at the same time, and his skin felt tight - especially his cheeks, where the tear tracks had dried. His neck was stiff from sleeping in a strange position, and when he felt something holding onto him he panicked. Years of being shoved in lockers and carried kicking and screaming to dumpsters before he finally resigned himself to his lot in life meant a strong instinctive aversion to feeling like he was being grabbed. He breathed in sharply, trying to figure out exactly how to escape-...and found the familiar scent of Puck's aftershave.  
  
...Right. That's where he was.  
  
He felt like waking up next to his boyfriend for the first time should feel better than this. Not like he'd been hit by a bus repeatedly.  
  
At least he hadn't drooled all over Puck's neck. That wouldn't exactly be endearing - or attractive.   
  
He had to get home. As much as he would love to watch his boyfriend sleep, curled up against his side like this, where it was just them and he didn't have to think about slushies or Karofsky or honor codes...it was morning already and his father was going to kill him...assuming of course that his father hadn't had another heart attack when he never came home.   
  
Kurt drew in a deep breath and slowly slipped out of Puck's arms. He wondered if Puck would remember the position they were in when he woke up - would probably deny the entire thing, Kurt guessed, which was probably just as well; he didn't exactly want to talk about how pathetically needy he'd been the previous night, either. In all honesty, he was mostly just surprised he'd slept at all. While at a certain point being able to tell 'depressed' from 'usual state of affairs' got murky, he remembered not sleeping very much while his dad was in the hospital even after all the necessary chores had been done. Lying in the basement and staring at the ceiling for hours on end, while he waited for his brain to turn off even though it had seemed like his mind was completely blank.   
  
It hadn't all turned out bad, he realized; his dad was alive, which was obviously the first and best thing...and that was kind of how he'd gotten his first (and only) boyfriend. Even if he would have much preferred something simple like an ask-out over a friendly cup of coffee.   
  
He expected Puck to wake up when he moved, and when his boyfriend didn't stir he wondered idly if this was normal for Puck or if it was because he was exhausted from staying up all night watching him sleep or something. He dismissed the idea quickly as ridiculous and overly-sappy; Puck was a teenage guy, and if living with a boy had taught Kurt  _anything_  it was that they could sleep literally 20 hours a day if given half a chance. And there was nothing they wouldn't eat, except anything that looked remotely good for them, but that was another story entirely. Knowing a kiss would probably wake him, Kurt instead just pulled the blanket up a little higher around Puck's shoulders and stepped back from the bed.  
  
He picked up his boots and sweater from the floor and crept from the room, closing the door quietly behind him. It occurred to him as he tiptoed down the stairs that, for the fact that there hadn't even been any sex, this was an awful lot like the proverbial walk of shame.  
  
The house wasn't quiet, he realized suddenly. The house was  _always_  quiet, especially if Puck wasn't up and about; sometimes Sarah would have the tv on, but this was different. Sarah was talking and-  
  
...Oh god, no. Not now. This was  _not_  the time to be meeting the parents.  
  
Not that he'd never planned on meeting Mrs. Puckerman. He had asked Puck shortly after the Hudson-Hummel family dinner if that disaster meant he would never be meeting Puck's mom; the response had been a shrug, almost as if to say 'if it happens, it happens, but I'm not arranging it.' It would've been odd if it weren't for the fact that a) Puck was so rabidly independent and b) Mrs. Puckerman worked a lot of long hours, a lot of double shifts, and was generally hard-pressed to get more than one day off a week. If she had enough time to get groceries it was a miracle; housework fell to Puck more often than not for that reason, and it just kind of  _was_. Not like Kurt would know anything about spending 14 hours a day at work; his dad just happened to have a job where he could go hang out after school so they occasionally saw each other without pre-scheduling it all first.  
  
But he'd expected that, when he finally  _did_  meet Puck's mom - because it had to happen eventually - it would be over dinner, and he would have brought a lovely dessert and be dressed in a festive outfit appropriate for the occasion, with a smile and a variety of dinner topics that didn't involve his Germanic heritage or Puck's fondness for his ass.  
  
He had not planned on meeting her as he did the walk of shame - without any actual shame attached because they hadn't even gotten naked (for once) on a morning when he looked like the definition of hell and was too mentally and physically exhausted to even guarantee he could remember his own name. On a morning when he didn't think he could manage charming because he was still trying to get past feeling like someone had kicked him square in the chest. Of all the days he didn't need this, today he  _really_  didn't need this.  
  
He tried to slip out unnoticed, but Sarah spotted him. "Morning, Kurt!"  
  
He could practically feel Mrs. Puckerman's glare beaming in his direction. "Who are you?" she demanded. "What are you doing here?"  
  
"Mom, it's fine - that's Kurt," Sarah replied.  
  
"Kurt of the no-last-name who is sneaking downstairs at 8:00 on a Saturday morning, get in here," she commanded, and while he knew there probably wouldn't actually be any repercussions if he disobeyed her, he really didn't want to chance it. He drew in a deep breath and tried to appear as put-together as he could, even if he could feel his face was blotched and puffy, he knew his hair was probably standing on end, and his clothes were rumpled and not particularly attractive. This was hardly the impression he'd been hoping to give. "What are you doing here?"  
  
He wondered if Puck had told his mother anything. Almost certainly not, he concluded. Puck wasn't exactly talkative about his life or the people in it with those he liked, he most certainly wouldn't be filling in authority figures on the details of his love life. And since Puck wasn't gay - and still maintained he wasn't, which Kurt had stopped trying to force a long time ago - then there wasn't even a chance there had been a coming-out conversation, which  _really_ limited his potential answers.  
  
"I'm a friend of P-...of Noah's," he offered, the name still feeling foreign on his tongue. He'd used it exactly once with disastrous results, then never again. "From glee club." Mrs. Puckerman looked him up and down, as though she was trying to figure out precisely why this mysterious glee club friend looked so disheveled so early in the morning as he crept down guiltily from her son's bedroom. Maybe she  _did_  know, Kurt thought. ...Or maybe she was just kind of a paranoid busy-body. "And you know my stepbrother - Finn Hudson," he added. When all else failed, bring in the golden boy who had been Puck's best friend for a decade, right? Surely Mrs. Puckerman didn't despise Finn nearly as much as Carole kind of hated Puck, considering who had done what in the whole babygate drama.  
  
Surely enough, her face lit up. "Oh! Oh, yes, of course," she smiled warmly. "I just heard about that, I ran into Carole last week at the gas station out of nowhere and she told me she'd...either just gotten remarried or was about to remarry, I don't remember which but it was recent."  
  
"About two weeks ago now," Kurt supplied. "The wedding, I mean."  
  
"Something like that," she nodded. "She certainly seemed happy - I mean, I don't know this man she married - your father, I suppose - but she looked fantastic. Tell her I said congratulations again, would you please?" She tried to remember what else Carole had mentioned about the changes - selling the old house, she remembered, and that her new husband did something with cars and owned a business, and there was a stepson...  
  
As Kurt saw the questioning look, like Mrs. Puckerman was trying to match him up with a story she'd heard or something, he decided now was the best time to make his exit. "Nice to meet you, ma'am," he said as he left as quickly as he could without looking like he was running out of the house.  
  
Either he was going to kill Puck, or Puck was going to kill him; at this point, he honestly wasn't sure.  
  
By the time he got to his car, he was torn: should he call his father and let him know that he was safely on his way - start groveling now? Or should he wait until he got home and try to sneak in unnoticed? There was always the chance his dad had fallen asleep without noticing; it wouldn't be the first time, not even remotely.   
  
No, he decided, he was much better off to call his dad now. The likelihood his father had managed to fall asleep without realizing how much time had passed wasn't great, not with how much he'd been hovering during dinner. He reached into his pocket-  
  
Where the fuck was his phone?  
  
It had probably fallen out somewhere, was laying in Puck's bed or next to the couch or something, but he wasn't about to go back in there to get it. Puck could bring it to him later, he'd email when he got home...after his father finished killing him.  
  
By the time he arrived home, he was half-convinced his dad was going to ground him, or murder him, or ground him and then murder him...and the other half thought maybe he could still sneak in unnoticed. No luck, he realized, as his dad was up and making himself toaster waffles in the kitchen. As soon as he closed the door behind him, his father's head poked around the corner. "Kurt?"  
  
The worry in his dad's voice was evident. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to-"  
  
"Are you okay?"  
  
"I should have called. I didn't mean to worry you, I just-"  
  
"Kurt." Burt placed a hand on his son's shoulder. "Are you okay?"  
  
"I guess," he replied quietly.  
  
"Then that's the important thing. And call next time." If his kid were anyone else, if the circumstances were different, he would be coming down harder...but Kurt got quiet if you looked at him funny with stuff like this, and considering how sad he looked just for existing... "Your boyfriend texted me, let me know you were there." When Kurt's eyes widened, Burt added, "And asked me not to kill him."  
  
"Are you going to?"  
  
"No. Look, I get it - when something bad happens, you want to be around people who make it feel better. I can't fault you for that, y'know?" Kurt nodded - he looked...together enough to fool most people most of the time, but Burt knew better. He was too quiet, his gestures too small... "Come grab some breakfast, we've gotta start on the electric in Finn's new room."  
  
Ah, yes. The new room project that Kurt had sworn he'd help with, if only because his dad wasn't meant to be lifting much yet and Finn was eager but completely unskilled. Physical labour didn't help him forget his problems nearly as much as his dad liked to think, but he had to admit that it was better than hanging around his room all day trying to dodge texts from friends with questions he couldn't answer. Besides - Finn getting a real room instead of commandeering the couch meant he could move on to bigger projects, like redecorating the living room. That would at least consume enough of his mind to maybe make him feel better.   
  
Creating something beautiful could only help an ugly situation, right?  
  
Yeah, it sounded lame to him, too.  
  
He padded to the kitchen and got some eggs from the fridge, fighting the urge to lecture his dad about the caloric content of the Eggos; he didn't have the energy, and it was better than what his father would've picked before the heart attack, so he could let it slide for today. "We having the conversation about what's next now or later?" Burt asked.  
  
"Doesn't matter - I don't have an answer," Kurt replied matter-of-factly as he assembled the necessary dishes and pulled the small omelet pan from under the counter.   
  
"Finn seems pretty sure he can protect you, but I dunno that I buy it," Burt stated. "I know he means well, and that guy of yours is kind of a bigshot, but there's a lot of kids at that school and he's gotta worry about his own school stuff."  
  
"Right." Even if it was an option, it wasn't the most dignified of options and the lack of independence of it all bothered him. But mostly it wouldn't help with the fear, the anxiety, the effects of living constantly on-edge; even walking into McKinley to go pick up Finn or ask Quinn something or talk to Rachel he felt the fear creeping in. He couldn't go back to living that way day in and day out.  
  
"Homeschooling's probably safest," Burt concluded. "And with how smart you are, you can fly through it, get it all done in a couple hours instead of being stuck in a school for eight, right?" he added, like that was a plus.  
  
Kurt wasn't sure how sitting around the shop doing homework could ever be comparable to seeing other people around. Even if he didn't like most people, even if he outright hated 95% of the population of McKinley and was sure it wouldn't be much better at any other public school... "I don't know that I want to be so isolated," Kurt tried to explain.  
  
"I thought you hated all the other kids," Burt asked, confused. Kurt had never been social. For as long as he could remember, it was the two of them most weekends - even when Kurt was starting to hit an age where group-dates and hang-outs should've crowded his schedule a little more. Even after joining glee, when he had at least a couple scheduled outings with Mercedes or one of the other girls every week...Kurt was never going to be someone with a ton of friends. He wasn't Finn with the giant football team group dinners - and that was fine by him, as long as Kurt was happy enough with it, but it meant he really didn't understand why that was a concern anywhere near his kid's radar screen.  
  
"At McKinley, sure; they were narrowminded, immature, and generally considered ketchup to be its own foodgroup. But at Dalton I learned..." He tried to put words on it and failed. He wasn't sure how to explain to his father - who had been more popular in high school than Finn was now - what it was like to find people after being alone for so long. What it was like to realize that this whole time, he  _hadn't_  been so disgusting no one could be seen with him, he just hadn't found the right people yet. Even simple things like having people to walk to class with...  
  
He loved Mercedes. He genuinely enjoyed spending time with Tina, and she was the one person who made him feel like less of a freak in the fashion department, even if they didn't always understand each other's looks. He got along with Quinn better than he ever would have expected and felt like he could trust her with some of the dicier issues of who he'd needed to be at that school in order to survive. But it wasn't the same as having someone at school who really understood him, accepted him for exactly who he was and  _got it_.  
  
"I just don't want to go from being lonely, to having people, to being  _really_  alone," he explained lamely, but it didn't convey most of what it needed to. "There's no community choirs around here, I can't join the gay chorus in Columbus until I'm 18, and some kind of creative outlet..."  
  
"Yeah," Burt sighed heavily with a shake of his head. "I dunno what to tell you, buddy."  
  
"Me neither," Kurt replied, staring at the spatula in his hand. "Hence why I said whether we had the conversation now or later wouldn't change things - there's no good solution."  
  
* * * * *  
  
While physical exhaustion to distract himself really wasn't his coping mechanism of choice, he had to admit that hauling drywall up two flights of stairs did keep him occupied through most of the weekend. And laughing at Finn trying to be handy was always good for lifting one's spirits - even if Finn did keep getting kind of offended that his really gay little brother was more-...what was the word he'd used? Macho? Manly? Either way, the entire house had laughed for a solid ten minutes at that - than he was when it came to fixing things.  
  
But when Monday rolled around and everyone went back to their regular weekly lives - Carole and his dad to work, Finn to school - and he was left to entertain himself in the basement all day, the loneliness started to really set in. Even if Puck weren't holding his phone hostage - okay not  _hostage_  precisely, as there had been no demands made for its release. Just that Puck got stuck doing errands for a decent part of the weekend, and when his mom was around he didn't get to just take the car places anymore because she was convinced he was going to do something stupid again. But even if Puck didn't have his phone, who was he going to talk to? Mercedes and Tina and Quinn got three minutes between classes eight times a day, plus lunch. What was he supposed to do for the rest of the seven hours? Blaine got a few more minutes but had further to walk and tended not to carry his phone with him except during free periods because the teachers at Dalton were much stricter than those at McKinley about the no-phones policy.   
  
Maybe he should try making friends in other timezones - ones who would be out of school while everyone in Ohio was busy being bored out of their minds. He wasn't even sure how to go about that.  
  
It shouldn't feel like this, he knew. First of all, it was a day off and what teenager didn't like those? He was usually a big fan of not having to haul himself up before dawn to endure his entire regime de beaute before school started at 7:30 - or, in recent months, before he had to leave at 6:45 to get to Dalton before 8 with traffic.   
  
Second, and more importantly, he'd done this before. He'd been lonely most of his life, until just barely more than a year prior he'd spent pretty much every weekend hanging out with his dad without much complaint. Isolation had been a fact of his existence since he started school and realized just how unlike everyone else he was - it wasn't as though the teasing had just started when he hit high school or anything. His choice of song for McKinley's audition wasn't entirely by chance and wasn't only intended to show off his high note. He'd made himself as invisible as he could - he cringed at the thought of some of the outfits he'd worn then - because it was preferable to misery.  
  
Loneliness still had to be preferable to misery, didn't it? To being slammed into lockers and hit with slushies and having freaking pig testicles-  
  
But it was only 2 on his first day and he was doing stir-crazy. He missed Mercedes. He missed Charlie. He missed laughing at Wes and David and teasing Ethan about the looks he got from gay guys.   
  
He missed Blaine.  
  
He hadn't been able to tell him-...even without the problem of Puck still having his phone, he didn't have the words to try and give Blaine the news. Not after everything Blaine had done to get him there. He knew his phone was probably blowing up in Puck's backpack right about now as Blaine found out, or at least wondered why he wasn't in school.   
  
While he knew it didn't  _have_  to be the end of the friendship, it probably would be. He knew Matt and Mike barely spoke anymore even though they'd been really close when Matt was still at McKinley. He knew he didn't speak to any of the people in New Directions (except Puck, and Finn by obligation) half as often as he had when they all went to the same school...and that was all in the same town. Blaine lived more than an hour away; the texts would fall off slowly, then stop, then they'd go their separate ways.  
  
He'd really enjoyed having someone who understood him without having to explain it all. Not that Puck didn't get him - it was just different. Mercedes meant well but so often needed an explanation of why something was important to him whenever it came to actually being  _gay_  instead of just being fluffy and into fashion. Quinn and Puck understood his walls but not always what precisely was behind them. Puck had managed to come out as "dating a dude" almost unscathed, minus a few too many slushies; Kurt had been called a fag since he was 9. It was a fundamentally different experience that Blaine understood and no one else in his life ever had - or ever could.  
  
It was just really,  _really_  nice to not feel so solitary in his life, was all.  
  
He was surprised when the doorbell rang at 2:30 - usually Puck (well, and Finn, but Finn had a key) had rehearsal on Mondays, since football had claimed every other day what with the team in playoffs now (what kind of playoffs, Kurt couldn't begin to identify, but he knew it was good) and glee club winding down a little after Sectionals. "What are you doing here?" he asked as he opened the door.  
  
"Some way to greet a dude," Puck replied caustically, but he was giving Kurt a once-over. He didn't look dead; that was a plus. He didn't look good, either, but he was wearing one of those ridiculous sweater things and accessories and had combed his hair and crap, and that was a decent sign. He didn't even look like he'd been crying recently.  
  
He just looked tired. Weary. Like he was trying not to think of the fact that how he'd spent today was how he was going to spend every other day for the foreseeable future.  
  
Puck wondered if he could get his mom onboard with letting him do homeschool stuff, too. At least they could hang out all day instead of Kurt being bored all day. And who actually wanted to go to school, anyway? Except then he couldn't play sports - damn. Neverfuckingmind then.  
  
"Sorry," Kurt offered. He grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge and held it in Puck's direction; when Puck shook his head, he closed the fridge and led the way down to the basement. "I figured you'd be at glee-"  
  
"Nope," Puck replied shortly. He had been pissed enough at them when he left rehearsal the week before, but now... Mr. Schue had no fucking clue what he'd done in all this. The dude thought it was no big deal that he brought Kurt and his scholarship into all this when there was absolutely no freaking reason to. No one in their right mind would think the scholarship was shady, and now he'd fucking  _lost_  it because Mr. Schue was being a self-righteous asshole who thought the entire world was about trying to screw over New Directions. Sometimes they just lost shit. Sometimes people wanted to leave for reasons  _other_  than fucking up the club. And okay, sure, he hadn't been cool when Kurt first left, but he got over it. Even if he hadn't gotten over it, he wasn't gonna go sabotage the guy or anything - that was just fucking cheap.  
  
And don't even get him started on Rachel and her "he was spying against us, no wait, he was spying for us because he knows we're more talented" bullshit.  
  
"What?" Kurt asked.  
  
"Nothing," Puck replied. He was a guy who did honesty, putting it all out there all the time, no matter what. But sometimes absolutely no good could come from saying something. The last thing Kurt needed to hear right now was that the teacher he already thought didn't like or stand up for him had gone out of his way to ruin his life.  
  
"You sure?"  
  
"Yeah," Puck nodded. He pulled Kurt's iPhone out of the inside pocket of his letterman jacket and handed it over. "You have like a thousand messages."  
  
"Thank you. And thank you for texting my father - he told me you asked that he not kill you," Kurt said dryly.  
  
"I'd just told him you were at my house but wearing pants, I thought he might." Kurt stared at him, wide-eyed. "He didn't tell you that part?"  
  
"No."  
  
"Oh." Puck shrugged and slipped off his coat, tossing it onto the cage chair at the foot of the steps. "What'd ya do today?"  
  
It was a simple question, completely casual, and absolutely not intended to cause the kind of existential panic that hit Kurt without warning. He'd done nothing. And even if he started an official curriculum, that was what he'd be doing with his days for the majority of the next two years. Maybe he could arrange some kind of internship and get himself a theater to hang out in in Columbus or something. It was hardly the real dream - running off to New York a couple years early - but might actually be doable. In theory. Though these days, nothing he thought should work out ever seemed to. He'd end up hanging out in the stockroom at the garage and hovering over his father to prevent him from doing too much lifting.  
  
He was sixteen. What kind of life was that?  
  
He knew he was being overly dramatic. He knew  _logically_  that it had been one freaking day and he would find something to do. But the crushing loneliness and outright hopelessness was starting to press on him again, and he knew what would happen if he couldn't head it off now.  
  
Puck saw the look. He saw the way Kurt's face kind of fell, then tightened, the way he drew in a deep breath like he was trying to convince himself it was all okay and he was perfectly fabulous. That was his cue - Operation: Dick-straction was on.  
  
(What? He just got really bored in history class, okay?)  
  
He caught Kurt by the arm and pulled him close, and Kurt eagerly leaned up to kiss him - all teeth and tongue and needy, especially the way Kurt's fingers tangled in the bottom edge of the mohawk just a little too tightly. Unlike Friday night where it felt like Kurt was almost too broken and lost for sex, this was more their M.O. - whatever that stood for, but he knew what it meant. He wasn't sure if that was a good sign or not, that the guy was finally depressed enough to need comfort sex, but he was happy to oblige.   
  
Kurt led him towards the couch - he wasn't sure when that had become their go-to makeout and/or fucking space, especially considering his bed was wider and only about twelve feet away, but he suspected it had to do with the cleanability of the faux-leather compared to the myriad of soft actual-silk fabrics on the bed. Or maybe by now it was just habit. He pulled off his sweater and draped it artfully across a chair, followed by his shirt, as if he planned the route based on being able to remove his clothes strategically along the way.  
  
Knowing Kurt, Puck thought, it wouldn't totally surprise him. He did follow suit and tug his shirt over his head, though he let it fall on the floor because he didn't care that much. Besides, Kurt's floor was always going to be cleaner than the bedroom floor it would end up on when he got home, so why worry? He stepped out of his jeans for good measure - they were past the point where the undressing was part of foreplay and  _well_  beyond any illusions of modesty. They were a couple of hot, horny guys who'd been having sex with each other for like four months now, so there was always a decent chance that anything starting with clothes wouldn't end that way - especially when Kurt started off the whole thing kissing like that. Starting the makeout session naked wasn't a bad thing anymore.  
  
Not like being naked was ever bad. He figured as soon as he got his own apartment, after he moved out or went to college or whatever, nudity would reign supreme. Commando was awesome, but never wearing pants was better. Easy access, man. And more comfortable.  
  
Kurt shimmied out of his pants as he reached the couch and gave a little look over his shoulder like he was half-afraid Puck had decided to ditch him at the last minute, and something about it shook him away from thoughts about the glorious future that would be Casa De Puck. The look was like something from last Friday night and that fucking scared him - made him kind of want to move into the freaky white basement permanently and set up a 24-hour watchline or whatever.   
  
He crossed the few feet to where Kurt stood and pressed him onto the couch, laying on top of him and practically smothering his mouth in a hot kiss. Kurt moaned softly and arched his back, erections skimming awkwardly against each other. His eyes were screwed shut, and Puck tried to cover Kurt's body with his own as much as possible, as if to subconsciously remind him he was there.   
  
He got being freaked someone was going to walk out. Didn't get why Kurt looked like that was his concern right now, but he got what that felt like - it sucked. Big time. And Kurt had enough suckage going on already, so he was going to make damn fucking sure that wasn't a real worry in the guy's mind.  
  
Not that he was really sure how to do that, but this seemed to be helping so he would keep it up. No pun intended or whatever.  
  
Kurt's legs spread slightly, allowing Puck to sink down harder against him, which elicited a moan from each. He adjusted his position slightly, reached down to direct his dick, and pressed between the cheeks of Kurt's ass - not inside, just resting there, but enough to get Kurt making that kind of whimpering sound Puck knew was code for 'oh please more'. When he began to thrust slowly between the curved flesh, he felt short, well-manicured fingernails digging into the backs of his shoulders. Kurt's head was back, leaving plenty of exposed flesh on his neck to kiss, suck, nibble - though he was afraid Kurt was one of those people who was hypersensitive to hickey-ing, with his skin being so light and sensitive and all. Then he really  _would_  be a dead man.  
  
"Get up a second," he requested in a low, hoarse whisper as he shifted his weight to the side. His cock was hard and leaking already, and he wanted desperately to be inside Kurt, to fill him, be as close to him as humanly possible and-...okay, he still wasn't clinging, he wanted to be very clear on that part.   
  
It was weird. He didn't usually think of fucking someone like that. It wasn't some kind of deep emotional connection - it was getting naked, doing the nasty, and the people he fucked were fine with that for the most part. The people he fucked repeatedly definitely were; they had to be if they kept coming back. Kurt got that, it wasn't some big dramatic 'I love you so I want to be inside you' thing; they were dudes, even if Kurt was gay, and they didn't talk about sex like that. He still didn't. Even now it wasn't a huge sappy romantic thing, it was...physical connection. But an important one, not just about something feeling good.   
  
It was hard to feel abandoned when someone's skin was pressed all up against yours and your dick was in someone...or vice versa in Kurt's case, he hoped. He wasn't entirely sure it worked in reverse, but judging from the girls he'd fucked it did...and he hoped he was right, because even if he was willing to suck the guy there was still no way in a frozen hell that big dick was going anywhere near his ass. (Not like a smaller one would be making its way there, either.)  
  
He laid on his side, back against the back of the couch, and snagged a condom. Kurt handed him the lube, and as Puck looked up to take it he saw Kurt looked...okay, kind of like he would if he was shivering, except he wasn't moving, which didn't make any sense at all but made him feel kind of guilty for having the guy get up even for a couple minutes. He slicked enough lube on to get away with very little prep work, then quirked an eyebrow and Kurt immediately laid on his side on the couch, facing the room. He reached back to grasp Puck's dick, apparently having decided that starting off small was either unnecessary or highly overrated, and began to very slowly press himself back down the shaft.  
  
Kurt gave a soft hiss and paused as it got partway in; it was a muscle practice thing like so many other tasks or skills, and except for the broom-closet quickie at Sectionals there had been no action in weeks. His ass burned slightly as the thick head of Puck's erection stretched the ring of muscles - once it got past there he'd be fine, he knew, but it took a second to dull the pain enough to continue. He sighed softly as the head popped past the problem spot and slid back steadily until he felt the rough thatch of pubic hair against his ass. He whimpered softly in protest, wanting deeper, wanting closer, but there wasn't anything he could do about that. He felt Puck's muscular arm wrap around him, broad hand pressed against the center of his chest, and the deliciously slow roll of Puck's hips made him moan loudly.   
  
His head lolled back against Puck's shoulder, a kind of panting gasp catching in his throat, as he reached back to clutch at Puck's thigh. He could feel Puck's heart in his chest, the slight uneven hitch in his breathing as he thrust...then Puck started to suck on the skin just behind the divet of his collarbone and he felt dizzy. His fingertips dug into Puck's thigh as he tried to pull himself back further, harder against the rolling hips. The feeling of Puck laughing against his skin as he flicked his tongue against the area he'd already oversensitized was electric and - he swore - made his cock start leaking. He shifted slightly, moaning as he did, and began to jerk himself off; he didn't want Puck's arm to move from its current place, pinning him back against his chest.   
  
Puck groaned something unintelligible about it being hot to watch Kurt working himself like that and sped up the thrusts, though he kept the movement the same as he liked the string of moans it was getting in response. Kurt gasped and stroked faster, or at least attempted to but it was awkward with the angle and he couldn't quite get the grip he wanted. Even so, seeing as how it had been like once in two weeks plus a couple very quick stress-relieving solo sessions, it had been too long with too little and he came quickly. Puck thrust hard a few times, stilled, and groaned in a way Kurt didn't think would ever stop sounding sexy to him despite its ostensibly unpleasant sound. He carefully pulled out but immediately closed the small gap between their bodies and placed his arm back where it had been - across Kurt's chest, firmly holding him in place.  
  
As Kurt laid close against him and fought the urge to interlace their fingers, he came to a conclusion: He wasn't ready to be done yet - to go back to thinking...and while he was reasonably confident that Puck wasn't going to force him to break all physical contact, in light of the cuddling Friday night (even if neither of them had mentioned it since), even wrapping himself around Puck as tightly as he could would still mean too much dwelling.   
  
Lucky for him, Puck's status as a sex god could never be questioned; he was almost always ready to go. Kurt didn't exactly have to take forever between rounds - though occasionally his ass needed a rest, he got hard pretty quickly - Puck was beyond what Kurt had even assumed to be possible outside the unrealistic fantasies of literotica or choppily-cut porn videos. He rolled over to face Puck, then reached down to rub his palm firmly over the limp member and smirked when he felt it twitch slightly.   
  
"Ready again so soon?" Puck asked with a playful smirk.  
  
"You are," Kurt replied with a lift of the eyebrow. "I've missed you lately," he added with a subtle flick of his tongue, but Puck noticed it - exactly like he was meant to - and let out a soft 'unf' sound.  
  
Precisely the reaction Kurt was going for.  
  
As he moved down the couch, Puck repositioned himself to give Kurt a little more room, slid up into more of a lounging position, and spread his legs. After a minute to try to remember what little sex ed he'd received in school and wishing he'd thought to look up the answer to this one online before it came up - no pun intended - he rolled it on carefully; putting it on before Puck's dick was fully hard wasn't ideal, but he wasn't about to wait anymore and he could keep a good enough eye - and hand - on it to make sure nothing slipped. Kurt smiled up at him, grasped the base of the shaft, and took the semihard cock into his mouth with a quiet moan. No chance of thinking about other things now - just the musky scent of Puck's crotch, the subtle pulsing sensation of the cock his mouth, the taste of latex that he didn't really like but was starting to associate with such pleasant things that he didn't dislike it anymore, the tension in Puck's thighs, the quiet rumbling groans...no existential angst there, just the sheer hotness that was his boyfriend.  
  
Even if said boyfriend hadn't actually given permission to be referred to that way. Not the point.  
  
He began with long, slow bobs of his head - when it wasn't quite full-size he could manage to take just about all of it, which Puck noted with a skeptical-but-pleased eyebrow raise. As the dick started to really fill his mouth, he backed off a little and let his tongue run smoothly over the areas he'd learned were perfect for teasing Puck to a frustratingly-slow orgasm that generally was accompanied by a look like Puck couldn't decide whether to kill him or chain him to the bed and never let him leave.   
  
Blaine stood at the bottom of the stairs, eyes wide as he saw what he was interrupting. He felt like he should just walk out, wait upstairs for...something, but it felt rude to deny seeing anything when he was seeing quite a bit. And he needed to say his piece - his whole body was on fire, spinning, electric, like he might spin off into orbit if he didn't tell someone and bring himself back down to earth. "Sorry, I-"  
  
Kurt jerked back quickly in surrpise and narrowly avoided scraping sensitive areas with his teeth. "What are you-" he asked. His face, neck, all the way down to his chest were flushed bright red as he drew his knees up to his chest and pulled a throw blanket to cover himself.  
  
"Doing here? I don't know," Blaine admitted. It didn't escape his notice that, while Kurt quickly flung the white blanket over himself and tried to tuck it around his torso as far as he could, Puck made no such attempts at modesty - just kind of lounged there against the arm of the couch, legs splayed with a quirked eyebrow as if to say 'Wanna look? Go ahead.' Blaine did his best to refrain, but he did have to admit that he could see what Kurt saw in the guy.  
  
"You an hour without calling or anything?" Kurt observed.  
  
"Yeah, I kind of..." Blaine glanced from Kurt to Puck and back again, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet nervously.  
  
Kurt drew in a deep breath. "Puck, can you give us a minute?"  
  
"Aw, c'mon-"  
  
"I'll make it up to you," he promised. Puck rolled his eyes and stood, padding in the direction of what Blaine suspected was the bathroom. "What's going on?" Kurt asked, looking Blaine over with concern. The guy had never been to his house, let alone unannounced, and judging from the time Blaine had left school early to get there.  
  
Blaine offered a nervous grin. "I just did something that may be the craziest thing I will ever do," he announced. "Hopefully. If I do more insane things than this, I'm kind of afraid of what it might mean."  
  
"What did you do?"  
  
"I'm sorry for interrupting, by the way. A really tall guy upstairs - your brother, I'm guessing? - let me in and told me where your room was, he didn't say your boyfriend was over." Blaine was bouncing on the balls of his feet again, his hands almost jittery at his sides.  
  
"What happened?"  
  
"I resigned."  
  
"What? Blaine, you can't quit the Warblers-"  
  
"No," Blaine replied with a kind of smile like it was all some surreal dream that even he couldn't believe. "Not the Warblers. I quit Dalton."


	10. Chapter 10

Blaine wasn't entirely sure what he expected when he made his announcement. Kurt staring at him like he'd lost his mind somehow wasn't quite what he had in envisioned. "Have you lost your mind?"  
  
"Maybe," he replied with a lopsided self-conscious smile.  
  
"What do you mean, you quit Dalton?" Kurt asked slowly, arms crossed over his blanket-covered chest, eyeing him. Blaine was more laid back than he was, but this kind of insane spontaneity was either something Blaine had kept hidden from him or something atypical; judging from the nervous smiling and kind of 'oh my god, did I just do that?' look, Kurt guessed it was atypical.   
  
"Lynn told me after fourth period that you'd withdrawn. I tried texting you, but you didn't respond so I went to Dean Hartley to try to find out if it was over the Warblers, over the firing squad the other day-" Kurt wasn't sure how to feel about Blaine trying to get private enrollment information about him from the Dean of Students, but he let his friend continue. "Then I found out it wasn't voluntary, and I-" He looked away, shaking his head, and it was like his entire body language changed. The nervous energy, the exhilaration of doing something so crazy, was replaced by something much more bothered. "They had no right to do that to you."  
  
Kurt stared very hard at the soft blanket covering his knees. "Scholarships have conditions," he replied simply with a kind of dull bitterness in his voice. They had every right to, even if it was the single most fucked-up decision he'd ever seen.  
  
"They took away your scholarship because you didn't speak up about something you knew wasn't against any rule or regulation. There's honor code and then there's just ridiculous. This is so far outside reasonable I can't even come up with a good word for it." He sank into the nearest chair. "I didn't protect you, Kurt."  
  
Kurt's head jerked up. The statement had seemingly come out of nowhere. "What do you mean?"  
  
"I brought you there. I thought I was throwing you a liferaft, hoisting you out of your old school so I could help keep you safe in light of how bad things were for you. You were the only out person you knew, you were miserable, and I thought that if I stepped in I could help you. Protect you."  
  
"You did-"  
  
"I didn't," Blaine stated, looking him in the eye. "I got you into Dalton and then stepped back. I didn't protect you. I didn't have your back when I should have. I saw the way you looked at me when the board was questioning you, questioning your motives. I knew you were right and I didn't say anything."  
  
Kurt wasn't going to deny that he'd been hurt when he was left without any backup in the firing squad meeting, but he'd realized almost immediately thereafter that asking one person to stand up against the entire room was kind of cruelly unrealistic; he didn't know anyone who would have done that for him, not even Puck...okay, maybe his father, but his dad wasn't 17 and still trying to deal with the social and educational repercussions of all that. Besides, he knew the story hadn't ended there. "Blaine...it's okay. Charlie told me how you stood up the next day during deliberations - you're the only reason the Warblers didn't kick me out. He told me-"  
  
"It wasn't enough," Blaine stated firmly. "I should have gone to the administration and told them the same thing, but I didn't know what they were doing until after all was said and done."  
  
"Then there's nothing you could have done," Kurt pointed out.  
  
"I went to them today. I told them I knew exactly what you knew - which is true. I knew he was coaching both teams, but I didn't say anything either. I practically dared them to take action against me, too; fair's fair, right?" His eyes darkened with disappointment and near-disgust as he recounted, "Dean Wyatt told me that, as I was a good student from a good family, it was hardly worth ruining my prospects. I about-...I was so pissed off, Kurt, I could barely-...Dalton's supposed to be better than that, you know?" he concluded quiet, his voice hoarse with frustration. "It has this policy that you can't bully anyone, they strictly enforce any kind of harassment, racism, even sexism which is hard to police at an all-boys school. But apparently classism is alive and well. They're supposed to protect the people who need it most. They're supposed to look out for people who don't have anywhere else to go. That's why I fell in love with it when I started there. After he said that..." Blaine gave a very tight, sad smile. "I told them that of the many lessons I had learned in my two years at Dalton, the most important were about leadership, about standing up for what I believe in...and that I wouldn't be returning."  
  
By the time Blaine finished the story, he looked so defeated that - if Kurt weren't still concerned about his overexposure - he would have reached over to rub his back or hug him or something. It was like the moment a child figures out there's no Santa Clause; Blaine had managed to figure out in the span of less than five minutes that his dream school was no better than the hellhole he'd left. Everything David had told Kurt about how at Dalton everyone was treated the same no matter what they were - it was bullshit. Sure, they protected gay kids on the basis of their gayness, but they didn't actually stand up for what was  _right_. They had the same 'sorry, tough shit' attitude his old principal had, but at least his old school had been freaking  _honest_  about it.   
  
"Please tell me you didn't give up your dream school for me," Kurt requested quietly, evenly. He could handle a lot of things, but that kind of guilt was not something he needed to be dealing with in light of the numerous other, more pressing issues.  
  
"What? Oh, no. God no. I couldn't stay there, not after the way they acted about it all."  
  
"Because I would still give about anything to get back in, and if-"  
  
"You want my tuition money?" Blaine joked, and it didn't work as intended. Kurt's jaw tightened, his eyes gluing themselves back to the blanket over his knees. Well that wasn't what he'd been going for. "Sorry."  
  
Kurt drew in a slow breath. "What are you going to do now?"  
  
"It occurred to me on the way over here that you don't currently have somewhere to go - right?"  
  
"Correct."  
  
"Because there's no way you could go back to your old school and your status there as the only out gay kid, with no support, no back-up, no one who understands what you're going through or can help you deal with it."  
  
"Also correct," Kurt stated. He was trying desperately not to think about it.  
  
"What if you weren't the only one?"  
  
Blaine's words sunk in slowly, and Kurt stared at him. "Now I know you've lost your mind."  
  
"Hear me out," Blaine urged. The optimistic look was back, for which Kurt was grateful, but the twinkle in his eye didn't make any sense. Who looked that way when they volunteered to attend McKinley? Hell, who voluntarily went to McKinley? "You remember what you said when we took you to have coffee for being such a bad spy?" Kurt smiled faintly at the memory. "You said you were the only out student there and no one seemed to notice the hell you were going through. But if there were two of us...To watch each other's backs, a second person to speak up when someone's making trouble. It's a lot easier to ignore one person lodging a complaint than it is to ignore two, especially since that means the second person is technically a witness instead of the victim." He hated the word, but it was all he could come up with - 'complaining witness' was too technical, and he blamed his government class's recent diversion into the criminal law process for that one. "At my old school, I remember going to the faculty, to the principal, and not only was it kind of the foregone conclusion that being out was my choice, like I'd made my bed and now I needed to lie in it, but at the same time it was almost like they didn't believe me - figured I must just be trying to make trouble for kids I didn't like. But if there's more than one person reporting it... Besides. Bullies? They're cowards. They go after a person they perceive as being weak, and if there's more than one person around it's a lot harder to...mess with them, y'know? There's a reason predators in the animal kingdom try and peel off one lone gazelle."  
  
"Gazelle?"  
  
"Would you prefer a different animal?" Blaine asked with a fond smile and made Kurt roll his eyes a little.  
  
"Why in the world would you do this?" Kurt asked, staring at him.   
  
Blaine shifted a little under Kurt's gaze, drew in a deep breath, and said finally, "A lot of reasons."  
  
"Such as?"  
  
"Part of it's guilt," he admitted. "I got you into Dalton but didn't stand up for you enough to keep you there. Hell, my advice is kind of what got you in trouble at your old school before, telling you to confront the people torturing you. Part of it's that I don't honestly feel like I can walk through those halls anymore knowing just how fucked-up the place is without wanting to scream," he added with a sad smile. "And part of it..." He struggled to find the right words and hoped that, if anyone would understand, it was Kurt. "I ran from my old school. I gave up and took the easy way out. And I've regretted that for a long time. I...looking back, I know logically that I would make the same decision again if I was back in that time, that place - I was a freshman and absolutely terrified. But now...I think I need to prove to myself that I'm not letting them rule my life."  
  
Kurt got what Blaine was going for, but he wholeheartedly disagreed. But given what Blaine had just given up - at least partly in his name - he wasn't about to start that fight. "You can't just go to McKinley," he stated slowly. "You have to be within the district, and you live an hour away."  
  
"I had some thoughts about that," Blaine offered with a sly smile.  
  
* * * * *  
  
"Explain it to me again," Burt requested, brow furrowed.   
  
"He quit Dalton Academy in protest and wants to go to school here," Kurt explained.  
  
"Like a buddy system," Blaine added with a charming smile.  
  
"Sweetie, that's..." Carole began slowly. She kept glancing at Burt like she thought he should be having the bulk of the say here, but he seemed even more at a loss for what to do than she was. "That's kind of a big decision to make so quickly like that, do you think maybe you should..."  
  
"I know it's a sudden decision, but I couldn't stay there after the way they treated Kurt," Blaine explained. "I'm not about to go back to my old school, and while I could easily find another private academy to go to I know that's not an option for Kurt. I hate the idea of him having to go back to where he was, and at least if there are two of us we can look out for each other. Besides, I hear they have a pretty good choir," he added with a grin.  
  
"What do your parents say to all this?" she asked.  
  
Blaine offered a sheepish smile and replied, "They kind of leave me to my own devices. As long as I'm not breaking any laws or doing anything that will end up in the newspapers to embarrass them, they don't really care. If I'm enrolled  _somewhere_ , that's all the more they care." He left out the part where they wouldn't even look at whatever transfer paperwork he put in front of them and, if he told them he was going to a boarding school in California they would only know he was lying because he wasn't charging plane fare to their credit cards often enough.  
  
Burt stared at him long and hard. "Listen, Blair-"  
  
"Blaine," Kurt corrected.  
  
"Blaine. Don't take this the wrong way, but...we don't know you. You seem like a good kid and all, and I appreciate everything you've done for Kurt - y'know, getting him the audition, helping him get the scholarship and everything. But you two came up here asking for you to move in, and I don't think that's a good idea. We already just doubled the number of people in this house and it's been tough enough. Adding a fifth person that only one guy in the house already knows..."  
  
"Dad, he'd live in my room, it's not a big-"  
  
"No," Blaine said slowly. "Kurt, your dad's right. It's not fair to impose like that." He turned to Burt and said, "I'm sure if I were in your position and a strange kid I'd never met asked to move in, I'd react the same way. It was just an idea I had."  
  
"You're welcome to hang out here, I'm not trying to say-...I'm not saying you two shouldn't hang out all you want, it's just-"  
  
"Oh, I completely understand," Blaine replied sincerely. "It's a lot to ask."  
  
Even though the new kid was talking, Burt's eyes were on his son. Kurt had looked excited when he came rushing up the stairs, trailed by Puck and the guy he vaguely recognized from the day they'd gone to Dalton for the official tour and paperwork. It was the first he'd seen his son looking even remotely okay since Friday, and he  _wanted_  to say yes to whatever they said, but they were just starting to get used to being a family unit instead of two guys in a house. If it were a year ago he probably would have said yes, but now...with Carole and Finn there, with the boys finally starting to bond enough that he didn't feel like he had to monitor every conversation they had...adding another boy to the mix was going to be too much. And it really wasn't a big enough house for five people, even with the attic and basement.   
  
Mostly this just seemed like a really hair-brained scheme. Quitting a great school to go somewhere you've never been but that you know sucks, in the name of the buddy system? He didn't even want Kurt going back there, let alone some other kid who - no offense or anything - looked like he could get his ass kicked by a squirrel or something. Blaine being there wasn't going to make him feel any better sending Kurt back to McKinley and, he had a hunch, wouldn't actually make Kurt's life that much easier. They needed to be looking at alternatives that didn't involve that damn school because no way was his son ever going to be safe there, not the way that jackass principal acted about everything, the way Schuester ignored everything bad that happened to Kurt..No. Not a viable option.  
  
The crushed look on Kurt's face and the kind of masked 'crap, now what?' look Blaine had made him almost want to change his mind, but someone here had to be the grown up. Kurt was 16, and despite knowing full-well how sad and unfair life could be he still wanted to believe good things would happen. Burt was glad for that, he knew it was probably the only reason his kid was still alive, but sometimes being an adult meant recognizing when something wasn't going to work. He was surprised to see the same kind of skeptical expression on Puck's face. The mohawked boy - whom he still wasn't wild about but had accepted wasn't a total delinquent hellbent on sucking his son into a life of biker bars and crime sprees - was leaning against the entertainment center, arms crossed over his chest, looking thoroughly unimpressed by the plan but like he wasn't sure he could come up with anything better. He looked like Burt felt - the plan sucked, but at least it was  _something_ , y'know?  
  
"Thank you for hearing us out," Blaine concluded politely. "It was good seeing you again - and nice to meet you," he added to Carole. He led Kurt outside, probably toward his car, and Puck followed doggedly behind.  
  
"I can't believe he wouldn't even consider it," Kurt said frustratedly once they got outside.  
  
"He's met me twice. It's not that unreasonable to say you don't want a guy moving in with your teenage son - sons, actually - when you don't know him."  
  
"It's not even like we're dating," Kurt protested. "It's not like I'm trying to move Puck in with me or something. He says he's concerned about my being safe, but then..." He shook his head. "Now what are you going to do?"  
  
Blaine drew in a slow breath. "Find somewhere else to crash, even just someone who can loan me their address would be enough to get started - the drive will be kind of a pain, but it's better than nothing."  
  
Kurt slowly worked through his list of friends in his head. "Rachel," he concluded as the obvious choice. "Her dads are never around, they have at least two spare bedrooms, and if anyone's going to understand, it's-"  
  
"No," Puck stated firmly.  
  
Kurt turned to look at him, confused. "Why not? Don't get me wrong, she's horribly annoying and I know that's not entirely fair to Blaine - inflincting her on him 24/7, but she was one of the few people who actually saw what kids were doing and would understand-"  
  
"She doesn't understand shit," Puck replied caustically, his eyes narrow. "She's the most self-righteous, self-centered chick I know and I dated  _Santana_  for like three years. Trust me - you don't wanna talk to her right now."  
  
"Why not? I thought things were fine with her and Finn now, she was more supportive than anyone at Sectionals-"  
  
"She said you were a double agent," Puck stated, and Kurt's eyes widened. "When the report came out, the one that said you didn't cheat or anything? She said the timing was suspicious and that if you'd shown up randomly at our school like a month before competition against your old school, then-"  
  
"You mean like Jesse St. Freaking James?" Kurt demanded, hands on his hips angrily.  
  
"Yeah. Then she said you must've been working for us the whole time and actively gotten Dalton disqualified because-"   
  
"Are you serious?" he asked, his face going pale in disbelief, then red with fury.  
  
"-you liked us better and thought we had superior talent or some crap like that."  
  
"She honestly thought-" The look on Kurt's face? That was why Puck hadn't wanted to say anything. Now he certainly wasn't going to say anything about Mr. Schue's involvement. None of this was helping the guy, it was just making him look like everyone he thought he could trust had betrayed him at  _both_  schools, and no one needed that - certainly not Kurt, and most definitely not now. "I lost  _everything_  and she honestly believed it was for HER?"  
  
"To be fair, they didn't know you'd lost the scholarship yet, right?" Blaine asked, trying to soften the blow, but he did have to wonder about these so-called friends of Kurt's if this was how they reacted.  
  
"Yeah," Puck admitted. "But still."  
  
"Still," Kurt echoed. He wanted to drive over there and shake her and demand to know what the hell kind of world she thought she was living in that revolved quite that much around her. But somewhere in the back of his mind...it was kind of like yelling at Finn and not just because they were dating. She honestly didn't get it. She genuinely couldn't comprehend how completely fucked-up that was. She wasn't saying it to hurt him, she was saying it because she was deeply that shallow and universally that self-centered. No amount of bribing Mercedes or Santana to cage-match her since he wasn't allowed to hit a girl would make her realize why it was beyond insulting to think that. Even as much as she'd been attempting to become a better person, as hard as she'd been trying to help before he left...she still didn't get it. That almost stung more.  
  
But killing Rachel - as self-satisfying as it might be - wouldn't help the problem. "Who else can we ask?" he asked, drawing in a deep breath and trying to calm himself down.  
  
For a club with twelve members, there were surprisingly few options. If Kurt was out, and Finn by marriage, and Rachel because she was crazy, and Brittany and Santana were out because they were Brittany and Santana, that left seven since no one was going to suggest Blaine go live with Lauren Zizes. There was desperate and then there was just  _scary_. He pulled out his phone and started dialing, keeping it on speaker so Puck and Blaine could hear so he felt a little less rude.   
  
The part he hadn't counted on was that, before he could actually get to the meat of his question, he had to explain enough background to underscore the urgency of the housing and/or address crisis. Luckily he had started with Quinn, who was one of the few people from school who already knew what was behind the mask and wouldn't either torture him for it later or worry herself sick over it.   
  
"How could they do that to you?" she demanded.   
  
"I know," Kurt replied distantly, and Puck was starting to wonder if this was a good idea if it meant having to explain it to every single person like this. Kurt already looked exhausted, like he was sick of people expressing outrage on his behalf when he was too drained to express it himself. "In any event, it means I may be coming back to-"  
  
"Ohh Kurt..."   
  
"Yes. But the reason I called - not that I didn't owe you a phone call anyway since it's been too many weeks since we've hung out," he added, pulling himself back into...well, Puck didn't have a name for it yet, but it was the other fake mode Kurt had. The one that was too active for Ice Queen but just as protective. The sort of fluffy-fashionista thing he did with Mercedes or the other girls (including Quinn, apparently) when he was upset about something but didn't want to be shutting them out completely. "One of my friends from Dalton - My best friend there, actually," he added with a smile at Blaine, and Puck kind of wanted to demand collection of the 'I'll make it up to you' blowjob right then and there when he saw the way Blaine returned the grin, "has suggested that he might come back with me. But he needs somewhere to stay in Lima to be eligible. You know I would never try to impose on-"  
  
"Are you kidding? There's no  _way_  my mother is going to let a boy move in with us," she stated. "After last year? She barely lets Sam come over, she thinks every guy in the world is either a sex freak like my father turned out to be, or  _Puck_ -"  
  
"Nice to hear from you, too," Puck said dryly.  
  
"...You couldn't have told me this was on speakerphone?"  
  
Kurt smiled faintly. "Sorry."  
  
"I wish I could help, I really do. I know how hard this must be for you, losing the other school, but..."  
  
"Would it help if I told you he's gay? No need for your mother to worry then, right?" Kurt offered and Blaine offered a winning, cheesy kind of grin even though Quinn couldn't see him through the phone.  
  
Quinn drew in a breath and hesitated. "I...don't think so," she said slowly, with a tone like each word was achingly painful to try to string together. "I don't care, you know that, but she's been trying to get back into church life after everything last year, and if-...It's not-..."  
  
Kurt cringed and closed his eyes, nodding. "I understand," he said quietly. "Between a pregnant teenage daughter and her own divorce..."  
  
"Right," Quinn replied softly. "Kurt, you know if it was up to me-"  
  
"Oh, of course," he replied. He did know that. He knew Quinn didn't care, she had been the single biggest supporter of his relationship with Puck from the beginning, but he also knew that in a family as religious as hers, it was hardly shocking that there would be issues.  
  
He had been used to it before, but being at Dalton where gayness wasn't something shocking or disgusting, he had let himself forget just what the parents in town thought of him.  
  
That meant Mercedes was out, too, he remembered; even though her mother was fantastic and had never said anything bad about him as far as he knew, her father was iffy about him. Not outright hostile, more...quietly disapproving.   
  
"Ask Sam," she suggested. "The condo's too small to have someone else stay here anyway, but Sam's place is  _huge_."  
  
"They'd get along pretty well," Kurt supposed. When Blaine looked curious, he explained, "Sam went to an all-boys boarding school until this year, he's one of the cooler guys about...well, everything, he'd be a good choice. Okay. Thanks, Quinn. We'll hang out this week?" After making tentative plans, he hung up and leaned back against the hood of his car.   
  
The next calls didn't go much better. Sam was totally on-board, but said his parents were "kinda douchey" - but they could totally use his address if that was all they needed, so that helped a little. Tina's crazy grandmother had just recently moved in (who knew?) and was practically sucking up all the oxygen in the house, let alone space. Mike's overinvolved mother barely let him have a phone conversation without butting in every five seconds, so that was  _definitely_  out. Artie asked his dad, who wasn't too keen on letting a kid he'd never met come live with them on the recommendation of a kid he'd met maybe twice.  
  
Kurt hung up the phone and stared at it for a long minute. Mercedes was his one and only shot; he knew she'd be on-board, he knew there was a spare room, but a part of him didn't want to call yet. As long as he didn't call and get the inevitable shoot-down at her father's behest, there was still hope. Once he got that no, that was it; the potential was over and he was stuck back exactly where he had been a few hours earlier: no good school options, probably teaching himself in the basement, with no real options for social contact and a huge weight of guilt on his head because Blaine had freaking  _given up Dalton_  for him.  
  
It hurt so much more now than it had before. He knew it shouldn't, it was the same position he'd been in, and nothing had actually changed in the meantime. The mere possibility of an idea of something that might work shouldn't feel this devastating when it was taken away.  
  
One of these days he would stop getting his hopes up, he concluded. He'd been quite good at it once. He'd managed to prepare himself to lose before Regionals the year before, he'd stopped believing he would ever actually get a boyfriend despite overtures to the contrary, he never expected good things to happen to him because the cruel cosmic joke of the universe seemed to bear him out on that every single time. But somewhere along the way...it must be in the last couple months, right? Because he certainly hadn't been optimistic while his dad was in the hospital, trying to quietly prepare himself for the worst case scenario...somewhere in the last couple months he'd stopped assuming everything would continue to suck and gotten used to things occasionally working out for him.   
  
That had been a shitty decision on his part. When he thought things wouldn't work and they did, he could be pleasantly surprised. When he thought things would work out and they didn't, he was crushed and always would be.   
  
Puck studied him carefully. As much as he thought "like Friday" was some kind of overused code for everything worrysome that Kurt did, it fit. Friday had been the epitome of Kurt being frighteningly down - like potentially ending up like all those guys he read about when he tried to search for how to help, kind of down. Seriously depressed and  _scary_. He counted through club members and knew Mercedes was the only one Kurt hadn't called, and judging from his hesitation there had be some reason that wasn't his first phone call. Meaning this call wasn't likely to net Blaine a place to stay, either, so the dude was going to go ride off in his expensive car and go to some other elite school while Kurt was stuck either here or in the shithole of McKinley where he was going to be fucking miserable.  
  
And then what? Looking like this for a couple days was freaking Puck out enough, he didn't even want to think about what it had to  _feel_  like for Kurt. Multiplied by weeks? Months? Freaking years - Kurt was stuck for at least another two, probably two and a half if he graduated at the time he was meant to. He couldn't even imagine feeling like he had over the summer for two fucking  _years_ , two months had about done him in and that was with plenty of distraction and the knowledge that at least some good had come of it. This? What good had come of any of this? There was no consolation, there was no higher ground or trade-off that made things worth it. Kurt was going to keep looking like this until he either slowly got better, slowly stopped caring altogether, or - Puck feared - slowly got worse. It wouldn't be a fast thing, it would be so slow none of them would notice until it was too late, no matter how close of attention he paid.   
  
No. He needed to head this off now. What had he said the other night? Vigilance. Snipers don't just watch shots pass them by, they fucking take them or they get their ass killed. He could give Kurt all the sex his ass could handle, but it wasn't going to be enough. There was exactly one thing he could do - not something he especially  _wanted_ , but given his options...  
  
"Live with me, dude," Puck said.  
  
Both boys stared at him. "Really?" Blaine asked.  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"Your parents won't mind?"  
  
"My mom's never freaking home, my nana's in Boca with her bubbe friends until April. I've got an annoying sister, but otherwise the house is kinda to myself."  
  
"You're sure?" Blaine checked. "I don't want to-"  
  
"Yeah," Puck replied. "Need somewhere to stay, right? If you're going to McKinley."  
  
He didn't really like the guy. He  _really_  didn't like the way the guy kept looking at Kurt, like they had some great secret in-joke all the time. It wasn't even that Blaine kept looking like he wanted to ask Kurt out - Kurt was totally free to do what he wanted, he wasn't going to pull some stupid jealous shit, but it was all so fucking  _doe-eyed_  and smiley.   
  
But Kurt being kind of doe-eyed and smiley was better than looking like he wanted to hang himself as soon as he found a belt he didn't mind ruining.  
  
"You're  _sure_?" Kurt asked, looking him in the eye. Puck wondered when Kurt had gotten this tall - he swore when they started dating he had to look down to meet Kurt's gaze, now they were almost eye-to-eye - maybe an inch or two off, but nowhere near what it had been.   
  
"Yeah."  
  
A kind of euphoric gratitude crossed Kurt's features and his eyes shined. "Thank you," he said quietly, achingly sincere.  
  
"Whatever you need," Puck replied simply. It was honest, even if he wasn't sure he was cool with how little alone time this was going to mean for the foreseeable future.


End file.
